dyke

, dike

1. an embankment constructed to prevent flooding, keep out the sea, etc.

2. a ditch or watercourse

3. a bank made of earth excavated for and placed alongside a ditch

4. Scot a wall, esp a dry-stone wall

5. a vertical or near-vertical wall-like body of igneous rock intruded into cracks in older rock

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

dike

[dīk]

(civil engineering)

An embankment constructed on dry ground along a riverbank to prevent overflow of lowlands and to retain floodwater.

(geology)

A tabular body of igneous rock that cuts across adjacent rocks or cuts massive rocks.

dike, dyke

1. A dry stone wall.

2. A long low dam.

3. A bank of earth from an excavation.

4. An earth embankment which acts as a coffer-dam for keeping water out of an excavation.

Dike

one of Horae; personification of natural law and justice. [Gk. Myth.: Zimmerman, 85]

See: Justice

dike

To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is "When in doubt, dike it out". (The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it.) The word "dikes" is widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean "diagonal cutters", especially the heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also refer to a kind of wire-cutters used by electronics technicians. To "dike something out" means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to attack with dikes". Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to informational objects such as sections of code.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Dike

a hydroengineering installation, analogous in structure to an earth dam.

A distinction is made between pressure and nonpressure dikes. Pressure dikes are installed to protect river and maritime coastal lowlands from flooding, as canal embankments (protective dikes), and for joining together pressure hydroengineering complexes with banks (conjunction dikes). Nonpressure dikes are erected for guiding a current flow for the purpose of regulating and straightening out river beds and for improving the conditions of navigation and operation of water-passage and water-collecting hydroengineering installations (hydroelectric power plants, water-spillway dams, bridge openings, pumping stations, and so on). Nonpressure dikes may be nonsubmersible or submersible; depending on the position of the dike in relation to the direction of the current, dikes are called longitudinal or transverse. Dikes are usually constructed of materials found in the immediate area (for the most part, rock waste); small dikes are made of earth, brush, stacked fascines, and so on.

Dike

an intrusive magmatic body that is bounded by parallel planes and that cuts the rocks that contain the dike. Dikes often consist of rock that is harder than the surrounding rock, and for this reason erosion causes them to protrude in the form of walls. Dikes accompany the formation of effusive and intrusive rock or form independent belts joined by magmatic hearths at great depths. A distinction is also made between radiating dikes, which spread from a common center, and ring dikes. Sometimes dikes are an indication of the presence of minerals (gold or polymetals, for instance).