[f. WHALE sb. + BACK sb.]
1. An arched structure over the deck of a steamer; = TURTLE-BACK 1.
1886. Times, 20 April, 10/2. He was standing under the whale-back when he heard a bumping noise and immediately felt a slight shaking.
2. A kind of steam vessel having a spoon bow and the main decks covered in and rounded over, suggesting the back of a whale.
1891. Pall Mall Gaz., 10 June, 2/2. The Americans claim that, in Captain Macdougall’s steel ‘whalebacks,’ they possess the universal ship of the future.
3. Geol. A large mound of the shape of the back of a whale.
1893. Sir H. H. Howorth, Glacial Nightmare, II. 774. Glaciers cannot explain the mounds called eskers, kames, or whalebacks.
4. attrib. or as adj. Furnished with a whaleback (sense 1); of the shape of the back of a whale.
1891. Daily Graphic, 24 July, 14/1. The first ‘whaleback’ boat which has crossed the Atlantic arrived at Liverpool on Monday.
1894. Engineer, 13 July, 33/3. A new craft is expected to take part in the yacht races at Galveston. She was built in Fort Worth, and may be classed as a whaleback yacht.
1903. Daily Chron., 29 July, 4/4. Beneath a hot sun Belgrade lies bleaching on her whaleback promontory.
Hence Whalebacked a., shaped like a whale’s back; Whalebacker, a whaleback steamer.
1879. Daily News, 6 Nov., 5/7. Whale-backed station of the London and South Eastern Railway Company.
1897. Daily Graphic, 24 July, 14/1. These ‘Whalebackers’ as they are termed offer very little resistance to the sea.
1903. Kipling, Five Nations, Sussex, 19. Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs.
