leeward
advEtymology From lee (“side away from the wind”) + -ward (“direction”).
1
Away from the direction from which the wind is blowing; downwind.
- Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 23, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
- No lady goat is safe from criminal assault, even on the Sabbath Day, when there is a genteman goat within three miles to leeward of her and nothing in the way but a fence fourteen feet high[…]ca. 1909, Mark Twain, ;;Letters from the Earth Letter VIII:
- Antonyms
- windward