throat

• throate, throte (all obsolete)

From Middle English throte, from Old English þrote, þrota, þrotu (“throat”), from Proto-Germanic *þrutō (“throat”), from Proto-Indo-European *trud- (“to swell, become stiff”). Cognate with Dutch strot (“throat”), German Drossel (“throttle, gorge of game (wild animals)”) (etymology 2), Icelandic þroti (“swelling”), Swedish trut.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈθɹəʊt/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈθɹoʊt/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -əʊt

throat (plural throats)

1. The front part of the neck.

   The wild pitch bounced and hit the catcher in the throat.

   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter 1, in The Purchase Price:

     Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes. […] She put back a truant curl from her forehead where it had sought egress to the world, and looked him full in the face now, drawing a deep breath which caused the round of her bosom to lift the lace at her throat.

2. The gullet or windpipe.

   As I swallowed I felt something strange in my throat.

3. A narrow opening in a vessel.

   The water leaked out from the throat of the bottle.

4. Station throat.
6. The part of a chimney between the gathering, or portion of the funnel which contracts in ascending, and the flue.
   • 1796, Benjamin Count of Rumford, “Of Chimney Fire-places”, in Essays, Political, Economical and Philosophical‎^[1], page 332:

     By the throat of a Chimney, I mean the lower extremity of its canal, where it unites with the upper part of its open Fire-place.

   • 1816, Encyclopaedia Perthensis:

     This course of bricks will be upon a level for instance, higher than this part, otherwise the with the top of the door-way left for the chimney throat of the chimney will not be properly form.

7. (nautical) The upper fore corner of a boom-and-gaff sail, or of a staysail.
8. (nautical) That end of a gaff which is next to the mast.
9. (nautical) The angle where the arm of an anchor is joined to the shank.
   • 1868, “Glover's Safety Anchors”, in Hunt's Yachting Magazine:

     The shoe iron must then become a mere loose piece of iron, and be found, on the heaving up of the anchor, to have lain on the surface of the soil between it and immediately under the throat of the anchor

10. (shipbuilding) The inside of a timber knee.
11. (botany) The orifice of a tubular organ; the outer end of the tube of a monopetalous corolla; the faux, or fauces.

• (gullet): esophagus (US), gullet, oesophagus (British)
• (windpipe): trachea, windpipe
• (narrow opening in a vessel): neck, bottleneck (of a bottle)

• (antonym(s) of “end of a gaff next to the mast”): peak

• throttle

throat (third-person singular simple present throats, present participle throating, simple past and past participle throated)

1. (now uncommon) To utter in or with the throat.
   • 1911, Paul Wilstach, Thais, "the Story of a Sinner who Became a Saint and a Saint who Sinned": A Play in Four Acts, page 17:

     He beat about and pecked the net until his mate was liberated, and, throating a song of gratitude, the bird he freed flew to the sky.

   • 1921, Harry Charles Witwer, The Rubyiat of a Freshman, page 31:

     As you know, I have gone in for the more manly athletics here with my visual enthusiasm, throating a nasty tenor on the Glee Club and shaking a vicious hoof on our dancing team. Well, last night the Intercollegiate Shimmy Contest with Goofy ...

   • 2017, Alexis Debary, Arab Nights: Post 9/11 Thriller set in Tunisia, →ISBN:

     Tariq wants to be tactful and refrains from his natural impulse to throat his pain and curse her loudly in French. The girl looks devastated.

   to throat threats

   • [1611?], Homer, “Book XIII”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. […], London: […] Nathaniell Butter, →OCLC; republished as The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, […], new edition, volume I, London: Charles Knight and Co., […], 1843, →OCLC:

     So Hector hereto throated threats, to go to sea in blood

     The spelling has been modernized.

2. (informal) To take into the throat. (Compare deepthroat.)
   • 1995, Kyle Stone, Hot bauds: a selection of steamy BBS writings, Badboy:

     The Roman began to throat his rigid flagpole of a mancock, making groaning noises.

   • 2017, Brian Patrick Davis, Songs About Boys, →ISBN:

     His head leaned back, water splashing his face as I throated his solid pipe. Those giant hands found the back of my head as he worked his hips back and forth to pump further and further into my mouth.

3. (UK, dialect, obsolete) To mow (beans, etc.) in a direction against their bending.

• throat on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Throat (disambiguation) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “throat”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “throat”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.