Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- intransitive v. To lurch or swerve while in motion.
- intransitive v. To rush headlong or carelessly; career: "He careened through foreign territories on a desperate kind of blitz” ( Anne Tyler).
- intransitive v. Nautical To lean to one side, as a ship sailing in the wind.
- intransitive v. Nautical To turn a ship on its side for cleaning, caulking, or repairing.
- transitive v. Nautical To cause (a ship) to lean to one side; tilt.
- transitive v. To lean (a ship) on one side for cleaning, caulking, or repairing.
- transitive v. To clean, caulk, or repair (a ship in this position).
- n. Nautical The act or process of careening a ship.
- n. Nautical The position of a careened ship.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- v. To heave a ship down on one side so as to expose the other, in order to clean it of barnacles and weed, or to repair it below the water line.
- v. To tilt on one side.
- v. To lurch or sway violently from side to side.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- intransitive v. To incline to one side, or lie over, as a ship when sailing on a wind; to be off the keel.
- transitive v. To cause (a vessel) to lean over so that she floats on one side, leaving the other side out of water and accessible for repairs below the water line; to case to be off the keel.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Nautical, to cause (a ship) to lie over on one side for the purpose of examining, or of calking, repairing, cleansing, paying with pitch, or breaming the other side.
- To lean to one side, as a ship under a press of sail.
- n. A slanting position in which a ship is placed, that the keel may be repaired; the place where this is done.
- n. The submerged figure or body which is cut off from a floating vessel by the plane of the surface of the water; the submerged portion of a floating vessel: a figure bounded by the plane of the surface of the water and the wetted surface of a floating body.
- n. A careening or lurching motion or movement; a lurch.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- v. move sideways or in an unsteady way
- n. pitching dangerously to one side
- v. walk as if unable to control one's movements
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Examples
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Users of this expression may be surprised to discover that the original meaning of to careen is to turn a vessel over on its side [...]
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In American English, careen is certainly a Lost Cause, since its use in this erroneous sense is recognised in dictionaries, but for British English it may not be too late to rescue it.
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Given that what people mean when they say careen is defined precisely by career, it seems clear when people say careen they mean career.
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You therefore conclude that careen is not a mis-pronunciation of career.
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The implication of rapidity that most often accompanies the use of careen as a verb of motion may have arisen naturally through the extension of the nautical sense of the verb to apply to the motion of automobiles, which generally careen, that is, lurch or tip over, only when driven at high speed.
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If, like Helen Hawkins, you don't know the meaning of the verb 'careen', you'd be wise not to use it while insulting someone else's 'fine writing'.
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Having dispatched “career” vs. “careen”, how about “hardy” vs. “hearty”?
Book Review: I love “Origins of the Specious” « Motivated Grammar
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America's Internet could careen away from the principles of freedom and openness it embodies -- and towards the likes of China's, with the government and corporations blocking Americans' access to large swaths of the web.
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They careen through our lives knocking things over, chewing things up and creating unpleasant smells, trails of mud and a level of confusion unknown to canine-free environments.
Dr. Peggy Drexler: Stuart and Polly: Is There Anything Else We Can Get You?
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In the French Concession, the city's most popular residential district, bicycles and scooters careen through the winding tree-canopied streets, holding such new buzz boites as Dr. Wine and The Apartment.
MaryW commented on the word careen
"The spearfishing skill of the Miskitos was so important to the English that when the time came to careen the ship, they brought their vessels to places on the coast where their strikers could hunt the prey that provided the most flesh."
Tim Severin, In Search of Robinson Crusoe (2003)
"Here the privateersmen dug two or three wells to supply them while they careened ships in an anchorage on the northern side."
I'd.
October 30, 2015
reesetee commented on the word careen
Fascinating. I've often wondered why two such similar words ended up with the same (or a similar) definition.
January 1, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word careen
"The word careen, 'to lurch or swerve while in motion,' illustrates a phenomenon that is frequently encountered when tracing the history of language: the development of a word can be influenced by other words of similar sound and related meaning, and similar words can exert mutual influence on each other.
"Careen was originally a nautical term meaning 'to lean a ship on its side for cleaning, caulking, or repairing.' The word comes from the French phrase en carène, meaning 'on the keel.' Carène is descended from the Latin word carina, 'keel, nutshell.' From the original sense relating to ships at rest, careen also came to be used of ships leaning to one side when sailing in the wind. In more recent times, the word careen has developed another sense, 'to rush headlong,' as in the sentence 'The truck went careening into the intersection,' and in other expressions in which the emphasis is on forward, rather than sideways, motion. In this sense the word careen has probably been influenced by the word career, 'to move or run at high speed.' Not only do the two verbs sound similar, but automobiles generally careen (that is, lurch or tip over) only when driven at high speed--in other words, when they are careering. Since the two verbs can be used in similar circumstances, the meaning of careen was probably extended to include that of career. This newer use of careen began to appear only in the 1920s. Many authorities on English usage, in fact, still recommend keeping careen, 'to lurch to the side,' distinct from career, 'to rush headlong forward.'"
--More Word Histories and Mysteries, from Aardvark to Zombie, from the editors of American Heritage (r) Dictionaries, 2006.
December 31, 2007