Word of the Day

: July 9, 2011

dreadnought

noun DRED-nawt

What It Means

1 : a warm garment of thick cloth; also : the cloth

2 : battleship

3 : one that is among the largest or most powerful of its kind

dreadnought in Context

"In 1941, the German battleship Bismarck sank the British dreadnought HMS Hood in the North Atlantic, killing all but three of the 1,418 men on board." -- From a "This Day in History" article by the Associated Press, May 24, 2011

"But a plain old Pontiac Bonneville, dating from the mid-'60s, is more impressive for its latent historical integrity…. In my neighborhood, this dreadnought from the V-8 era of pre-EPA profligacy has been haunting the curb for months." -- From an article by Brian Miller in the Seattle Weekly, March 23, 2011

Did You Know?

"Fear nothing" -- that is essentially what "dread" plus "nought" means. The name might seem a strange one for a garment, but if you consider that dreadnoughts were worn onboard ships, you can appreciate the colorful name perhaps as much as the seafaring men must have appreciated the thick protection dreadnoughts offered from the elements. The clothes and the cloth, first called "fearnought" in the late 18th century, came long before the battleship. Not until 1906 did the British Navy launch HMS Dreadnought, the first battleship to have a main armament consisting entirely of big guns all of the same caliber. All ships of this type were then called "dreadnoughts." That particular type of battleship soon became obsolete, but their legacy lives on in the extended third sense of "dreadnought."