chine

noun

1. The top of a ridge.
2. The spine of an animal.

   “And chine with rising bristles roughly spread.”

   “[…] the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard […]”

   “The prerogatives which the Spartans have allowed their kings are the following. In the first place, two priesthoods, those (namely) of Lacedaemonian and of Celestial Jupiter; […] and of having a hundred picked men for their body guard while with the army; likewise the liberty of sacrificing as many cattle in their expeditions as it seems them good, and the right of having the skins and the chines of the slaughtered animals for their own use.”

3. A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking.
4. A sharp angle in the cross section of a hull.
5. A longitudinal line of sharp change in the cross-section profile of the fuselage or similar body.
6. A hollowed or bevelled channel in the waterway of a ship's deck.
7. The edge or rim of a cask, etc., formed by the projecting ends of the staves; the chamfered end of a stave.
8. The back of the blade on a scythe.
9. (Southern-England, Vancouver)A steep-sided ravine leading from the top of a cliff down to the sea.

   “The cottage in a chine, we were not to behold it.”

   “In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts.”

verb

1. (transitive)To cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
2. To chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine.
3. (obsolete)To crack, split, fissure, break.

   “The wayward son did chine his father's heart.”

   “A drought had caused the earth to chine and cranny.”

   “After the erth be brent, chyned & chypped by the hete of the sonne.”