Hawse

1. n. That part of a vessel’s bow in which are the hawse holes for the cables.
2. n. A hawse hole.
3. n. The situation of the cables when a vessel is moored with two anchors, one on the starboard, the other on the port bow.
4. n. The distance ahead to which the cables usually extend; as, the ship has a clear or open hawse, or a foul hawse; to anchor in our hawse, or athwart hawse.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.