English

Anonymous follower of Domenico Fetti, Landschaft mit Menschen im Sturm (Landscape with People in a Storm, 17th century), displayed at the Dorotheum, Vienna, Austria

Alternative forms

• weather-bound

Adjective

weatherbound ‎(comparative more weatherbound, superlative most weatherbound)

1. (often nautical) Delayed or prevented by bad weather from doing something, such as travelling.
   • 1869, Henry S[ambrooke] Leigh, “Weatherbound in the Suburbs”, in Carols of Cockayne, London: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, OCLC 561611190, page 99:

     WEATHERBOUND IN THE SUBURBS [title]. The air is damp, the skies are leaden; / The ominous lull of impending rain / Presses upon me, and seems to deaden / Every sense but a sense of pain. // Hopes of getting again to London / Lapse into utter and grim despair; […]

   • 1889, Edward Frederick Knight, The “Falcon” on the Baltic. A Coasting Voyage from Hammersmith to Copenhagen in a Three-ton Yacht, London: W. H. Allen & Co., OCLC 60914987:

     [I]n Denmark, a proverbially windy country, the season was exceptionally stormy. In consequence of all this we were frequently weather-bound, as a rule in the least interesting harbours, for several days at a time; […]

   • 1908, Knud Rasmussen, G. Herring, editor, The People of the Polar North: A Record, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. Dryden House, Gerrard Street, W., OCLC 599531, page 86:

     We shall have to lie here weatherbound more than one twenty-four hours, with the southwest wind beginning work like this.

   • 1927, T[homas] E[dward] Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert, New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran Company, OCLC 394658:

     A crowd of Arabs, Zeid's men, weather-bound here on their way to Feisal, ran out when they heard her trumpeting approach, and shouted with joy at so distinguished an entry into the village.

   • 1934, Uffa Fox, Sailing Seamanship and Yacht Construction, London: Edward Davies, OCLC 3581707; republished Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002, ISBN 978-0-486-42329-6, page 262:

     The idea behind the cruiser is a vessel in which my wife and I could cruise in comfort the year round, and yet fast enough to take part in an occasional ocean race, a vessel that in meeting a head wind in the channel could make good on her passage instead of spending weeks weatherbound. For having left trading schooners and ketches and wholesome yachts weatherbound in Dover when in a little 6-metre, which made the passage to Newhaven dead to windward in 12 hours, I realise that the ability to go to windward is very desirable however much cruising men may scorn it, for it was not the weather, although it blew hard, that kept these vessels weatherbound, but the knowledge that with the wind and sea against them they would only fetch back to Dover again after a long tack off and on.

   • 1986, Jonathan Raban, Coasting, London: Collins Harvill, ISBN 978-0-00-272119-6; republished London: Picador, 1987, ISBN 978-0-330-29977-0, page 55:

     Next morning a gale was blowing and even the fishing fleet was weatherbound, huddled together in the lee of the outer breakwater as the sea feathered and plumed over the esplanade.

   • 1995, Geoffrey Williams, Flying through Fire: FIDO – the Fogbuster of World War Two, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7509-0881-8, page 2:

     I see in the paper circulated, that the enemy last night used 210 bombers over Great Britain. Have they had losses similar to those we suffered? Or are our aerodromes far more weatherbound than theirs?

   • 1997, Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 978-0-8050-3393-9; republished as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York, N.Y.: Picador, 2001, ISBN 978-0-312-42043-7:

     [T]here is Judgment Day—a sense of visitation, the smell of fear, the appearance of the unwanted, ten nights in a barroom and the thrill of waiting around for the end of the world—in the most weatherbound.

Quotations

• For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:weatherbound.

Translations

References

• “weatherbound” (US) / “weatherbound” (UK) in Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press.