drowned, ppl. a.
(draʊnd)
Also drownded (now vulg.)
[f. drown v. + -ed1.]
1. a. Killed by submersion in water.
| a 1300 Cursor M. 1886 A druned beist þar lai flettand. 1660 Gauden Brownrig 212 A drenched and almost drowned man. 1789 W. Buchan Dom. Med. (1790) 631 The society for the recovery of drowned persons. 1896 Westm. Gaz. 20 June 5/2 Relatives of drowned passengers. |
b. like, as wet as, a drowned rat: in a thoroughly soaked and dripping condition.
| c 1500 Blowbol's Test. in Halliw. Nugæ P. 2 He lokyd furyous as a wyld catt, And pale of hew like a drowned ratte. 1630 Wadsworth Pilgr. viii. 84, I got on shoare as wet as a drowned Rat. 1738 Swift Polite Convers. 17 ‘Take Pity on poor Miss; don't throw Water on a drownded Rat.’ 1880 New Virginians II. 229 Looking like the drowndest of drowned rats. |
2. Submerged; flooded, deluged, inundated. spec. in Physical Geogr.: designating a valley or other land-form that is partly or wholly under water as a result of a (permanent) change in the relative levels of land and sea (or lake).
| 1616 Norden Surv. Kirton in Lindsey 17 in Peacock N.W. Linc. Gloss., There is much drowned lande. 1711 Shaftesbury Charac. Misc. ii. i. (1737) III. 46 The Measure of their yearly drounded Lands. 1865 Dircks Mrq. Worc. 538 The Mineral wealth was drowned treasure. 1867 F. Francis Angling ix. (1880) 332 A drowned line is too often a lost fish. 1874 Knight Dict. Mech., Drowned-level (Mining), a depressed level or drainage-gallery in a mine, which acts on the principle of an inverted syphon. [1889 W. M. Davis in Nat. Geogr. Mag. I. 213 The antithesis of this is the effect of depression, by which the lower course may be drowned, flooded or fjorded.] 1902 Ld. Avebury Scenery of England iv. 125 When the land is sinking..the drowned river-valleys make the coast irregular and complicated. 1902 Geol. Atlas U.S. lxxxiii. 17/2 Both types belong to the class known among physiographers as drowned shores, a designation which signifies that they are more deeply submerged now than they were at some shortly preceding epoch. 1908 Ibid. clviii. 1/3 A subsidence of the coast has transformed the lower portions of the old river valleys into deep marine channels... A shore line exhibiting these characteristics is termed a ‘drowned coast’. 1937 Wooldridge & Morgan Physical Basis Geogr. xxi. 354 The drowned river valleys or rias of South-western Ireland. 1957 G. E. Hutchinson Treat. Limnol. I. i. 11 The northern part of Lake Victoria, with its numerous drowned valleys. 1963 D. W. & E. E. Humphries tr. Termier's Erosion & Sedimentation v. 126 Superficially similar phenomena, sometimes classed as fjords (but simply ‘drowned valleys’), occur in regions which have never been glaciated. |