See also: Catadupe

English edit

Etymology edit

From an 18th-century missionary's account of the Catadupes not hearing the sound of falls on the Nile.

Noun edit

catadupe (plural catadupes)

  1. Waterfall; cataract.
    • 1938, Mark Twain (Bernard DeVoto, ed.), Letters from the Earth, page 110:
      Yet was not this all; for hither to the north boiled the majestic cataract in unimaginable grandiloquence, and thither to the south sparkled the gentle catadupe in serene and incandescent tranquillity, whilst far and near the halcyon brooklet flowed between!
    • 1978, Daniel Tuvill, John L. Lievsay, Essays Politic and Moral and Essays Moral and Theological, →ISBN, page 129:
      It happens oftentimes that in the church of God, where the waters of Siloam should run with silence, there is nothing heard but the tempestuous roaring of some gulf or catadupe.
    • 2001 Autumn, Andrew Ehrenberg, “Marketing: Romantic or realist”, in Marketing Research, volume 13, number 3:
      It sounds just like storing up more catadupes of undigested data.