English

Adjective

terraqueous ‎(not comparable)

1. (of a celestial body) Comprising both land and water, like the Earth.
   • 1885, John Ormsby, Don Quixote, volume 2, translation of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, chapter XXIX:

     "And when we come to that line your worship speaks of," said Sancho, "how far shall we have gone?" ¶ "Very far," said Don Quixote, "for of the three hundred and sixty degrees that this terraqueous globe contains, as computed by Ptolemy, the greatest cosmographer known, we shall have travelled one-half when we come to the line I spoke of."

2. Consisting of or involving earth and water.
   • 1829, Andrew Ure, A New System of Geology, in Which the Great Revolutions of the Earth and Animated Nature, are Reconciled at Once to Modern Science and Sacred History, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, Book II, Chapter V, p. 341,

     Thus the vicissitudes of the land and ocean, portrayed in the tertiary formations, harmonise perfectly with other terraqueous phenomena of the same geological period.

   • 1884, John Addington Symonds "Stella Maris," sonnet LIV in Vagabunduli Libellus, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., p. 64,

     Spirit of light and darkness! I no less / Twy-natured, but of more terraqueous mould, / In whom conflicting powers proportion hold / With poise exact, before thy proud excess / Of beauty perfect and pure lawlessness / Quail self-confounded; neither nobly bold / To dare for thee damnation, nor so cold / As to endure unscathed thy fiery stress.

   • 1892, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Chapter XLIII,

     […] strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered.

   • 1975, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Men of Maize, translated by Gerald Martin, Delacorte, p. 138,

     When the projectile fell in the mortar with the end of the fuse left outside like a rat's tail, others, more experienced, put the brand to it and ... boom ... boom ... boom ... violent terraqueous explosions, followed by booming detonations high up in a vast sky now full of stars.

Translations

References

• terraqueous in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913