Dictionary

Nordcaper en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowing from Dutch, a reference to the North Cape in Finnmark, Norway, where most of these whales were found by Dutch and Norwegian whalers.

Meanings

1. A type of baleen whale from the North Atlantic (Balaena mysticetus or Balaena biscayensis).
   • It may be mentioned that thus it was evidently not merely by chance that a Nordcaper was caught near the Faroes the same year. 1935, Ragnar Spärck, Søren Ludvig Tuxen, The Zoology of the Faroes: Vermes, Tardigrada:
   • Besides the “Nordcapers,” the voyagers one day fell in with another species of dolphin, three or four of which gambolled under the Germania's bows. 1880, William Henry Davenport Adams, Recent Polar Voyages:
   • Taking all our 69 Nordcapers together, the average girth, according to the measurements given, is just about 63 per cent. of the length of the fish ; that is to say, a whale of average size, say 474 feet long, would have a girth of 30 feet. 1926, Fishery Board for Scotland, Fishery Board for Scotland Scientific Investigations, page 8:
   • he repeated that he received the material from a whaler who had collected it from a ”Nordcaper” between Iceland and Newfoundland. 1998, Dale R. Calder, Willem Vervoort, Some Hydroids (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa) from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in the North Atlantic Ocean, page 356:

Forms