What is another word for undertow?

Pronunciation: [ˌʌndətˈə͡ʊ] (IPA)

Undertow is a word that refers to the strong current beneath the surface of water, usually the ocean, that can pull swimmers and boats out to sea. Other synonyms for undertow include rip current, riptide, backwash, and undertide. Rip current is a swift, narrow, and powerful stream of water that flows at right angles to the shoreline and is the most common cause of drowning at sea. A riptide, on the other hand, is a current flowing out to sea, caused by waves breaking on the shore. Backwash is the water flowing back towards the sea after a wave has broken, and undertide is a slow, continuous, and sometimes turbulent flow of water beneath the surface. Knowing these synonyms can help swimmers and boaters stay safe in the water by avoiding dangerous currents and understanding oceanography.

What are the hypernyms for Undertow?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

What are the hyponyms for Undertow?

Hyponyms are more specific words categorized under a broader term, known as a hypernym.
  • hyponyms for undertow (as nouns)

Usage examples for Undertow

His victory in primary and election seemed to demonstrate an augmented popularity, and yet he had become instinctively cognizant of a covert but bitter undertow of hatred against him: something unspoken and indefinable but existent and malign.
"The Tempering"
Charles Neville Buck
It carried, however, a most uncomfortable force like a cruel undertow beneath the seemingly safe crest of a wave.
"The Reclaimers"
Margaret Hill McCarter
He knew the chart Of the sailor's heart, All its pleasures and its griefs, All its shallows and rocky reefs, All those secret currents, that flow With such resistless undertow, And lift and drift, with terrible force, The will from its moorings and its course.
"The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Famous quotes with Undertow

  • Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.
    John Thorn
  • A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
    Marguerite Young
  • Well, you're either lovers or you're wanting to be lovers or you're trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow.
    Andrew Schneider
  • Well, I didn't ever think about Australia much. To me Australia had never been very interesting, it was just something that happened in the background. It was Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee movies and things that never really registered with me and I didn't pay any attention to it at all. I went out there in 1992, as I was invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I got there and realised almost immediately that this was a really really interesting country and I knew absolutely nothing about it. As I say in the book, the thing that really struck me was that they had this prime minister who disappeared in 1967, Harold Holt and I had never heard about this. I should perhaps tell you because a lot of other people haven't either. In 1967 Harold Holt was prime minister and he was walking along a beach in Victoria just before Christmas and decided impulsively to go for a swim and dove into the water and swam about 100 feet out and vanished underneath the waves, presumably pulled under by the ferocious undertow or rips as they are called, that are a feature of so much of the Australian coastline. In any case, his body was never found. Two things about that amazed me. The first is that a country could just lose a prime minister — that struck me as a really quite special thing to do — and the second was that I had never heard of this. I could not recall ever having heard of this. I was sixteen years old in 1967. I should have known about it and I just realised that there were all these things about Australia that I had never heard about that were actually very very interesting. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it is a fascinating place. The thing that really endeared Australia to me about Harold Holt's disappearance was not his tragic drowning, but when I learned that about a year after he disappeared the City of Melbourne, his home town, decided to commemorate him in some appropriate way and named a municipal swimming pool after him. I just thought: this is a great country.
    Bill Bryson

Related words: undertow myth, myth of undertow, undertow novel, undertow novel series, myth of the undertow, myth of undertow definition

Related questions:

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