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OneKitly

coastline

nounattested in dialogue

  • United States

The shape, outline, or boundary of a coast. (The term coastline is generally used to describe the approximate boundaries at relatively large spatial scales.)

noun

  1. 1

    The shape, outline, or boundary of a coast. (The term coastline is generally used to describe the approximate boundaries at relatively large spatial scales.)

    The sweep of the rocky Southern California coastline off Point Fermin.

    Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks of M’ Gillicuddy, Slieve Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom.

    With the sea below us grey and storm swept, and the coast line vague in the driving rain, we forged our way up the bank to breast the summit at 37 m.p.h.

    The journey is worth an article in itself, but all I can give is a flavour of a railway which traverses a bleak but dramatic coastline that's regularly battered by the elements - especially around Parton, where the line is constantly threatened by the sea.

Etymology

From coast + line.

Forms

plural
coastlines
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).