powdike

English

Etymology

Scots pow, pou (“a pool, a watery or marshy place”), from pool.

Noun

powdike (plural powdikes)

1. (UK, obsolete) A dike around a marsh or fen.
   • 1628–1644, Edw[ard] Coke, (please specify |part=1 to 4), London:

     cut down or break up the Powdike in Marshland

   • 1705, Michael Dalton, The Country Justice, page 383:

     Powdikes or other Banks in Marsh-land

   • 1725, John Colonel Armstrong, The History Of The Ancient and Present State Of The Navigation Of The Port of King's-Lyn, And Of Cambridge, page 92:

     Therefore Marshland (as Things now stand) runs a double Risque of Inundation. - First, from the Land Waters, wich overflow the Fens, and rise high against the Powdike in time of Floods, whereby the said Powdike is in danger to be rent and torn, undermin'd and blown up. [...] raise such violent Waves against the Powdike, as will break and tear it to pieces.

   • 1845, Encyclopaedia Metropolitana; Or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge on an Original Plan Comprising the Twofold Advantage of a Philosophical and an Alphabetical Arrangement, with Appropriate Engravings Edited by Edward Smedley, Hugh James Rose, Henry John Rose: Miscellaneous and lexicographical, vol. 10, page 519:

     […] perversely and maliciously to cut down or destroy the powdike, in the fens of Norfolk and Ely, is felony […]

References

• “powdike”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.