1. That cockles or puckers.
1601. Act 43 Eliz., c. 10. The same Clothes … are found to shrinke, rewey, pursey, squally, cockling.
2. Of the sea: Breaking into short irregular waves, tumbling, ‘chopping.’
1628. Digby, Voy. Medit. (1868), 75. Verie foule weather, variable windes, and a growne cockling sea, the waues meeting from all sides.
1699. Dampier, Voy., II. III. v. 57 (R.). In this Passage between the said Islands we find strange Rippling and Cockling Seas, ready to leap in upon the Ships Deck.
1773. Hawkesworth, Voy., III. 650. There run a short cockling sea which must very soon have bulged the ship if she had strucke.
1793. Smeaton, Edystone L., § 288. There was such a cockling sea.
1847–8. H. Miller, First Impr., v. (1857), 63. For acres together they present the phenomenon of a cockling sea of gardens—a rural Bay of Biscay agitated by a ground swell.
† 3. Uneven, rising and falling; or, perhaps, unsteady, coggly, cockly. Obs.
1711. E. Ward, Quix., I. 105.
| And on the Cockling dirty Stones | |
| Drop’d down upon his Marrow-Bones. |
