strand

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Land, typically a beach, bordering a body of water.
• intransitive verb To drive or run (a boat, for example) ashore or aground.
• intransitive verb To cause (a whale or other sea animal) to be unable to swim free from a beach or from shallow water.
• intransitive verb To bring into or leave in a difficult or helpless position.
• intransitive verb Baseball To leave (a base runner) on base at the end of an inning.
• intransitive verb Linguistics To separate (a grammatical element) from other elements in a construction, either by moving it out of the construction or moving the rest of the construction. In the sentence What are you aiming at, the preposition at has been stranded.
• intransitive verb To be driven or run ashore or aground.
• intransitive verb To be stranded, as on a beach. Used of sea animals.
• noun A complex of fibers or filaments that have been twisted together to form a cable, rope, thread, or yarn.
• noun A single filament, such as a fiber or thread, of a woven or braided material.
• noun A ropelike length of something.
• noun A wisp or lock of hair.
• noun One of the elements woven together to make an intricate whole, such as the plot of a novel.
• transitive verb To make or form (a rope, for example) by twisting strands together.
• transitive verb To break a strand of (a rope, for example).

from The Century Dictionary.

• To drive or run aground on the sea-shore: as, the ship was stranded in the fog: often used figuratively.
• To drift or be driven on shore; run aground, as a ship.
• To be cheeked or stopped; come to a standstill.
• noun The shore or beach of the sea or ocean, or (in former use) of a lake or river; shore; beach.
• noun A small brook or rivulet.
• noun A passage for water; a gutter.
• Specifically, in law, to ground: said of the running of a vessel by accident upon the sands or rocks so that she is helpless there for some time.
• noun A number of yarns or wires twisted together to form one of the parts of which a rope is twisted; hence, one of a number of flexible things, as grasses, strips of bark, or hair, twisted or woven together. Three or more strands twisted together form a rope. See cut under crown, v. t., 9.
• noun A single thread; a filament; a fiber.
• noun A string.
• To break one or more of the strands of (a rope).
• In rope-making, to form by the union or twisting of strands.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To break a strand of (a rope).
• intransitive verb To drift, or be driven, on shore to run aground.
• transitive verb To drive on a strand; hence, to run aground.
• noun The shore, especially the beach of a sea, ocean, or large lake; rarely, the margin of a navigable river.
• noun (Zoöl.) See Shore birds, under Shore.
• noun (Zoöl.) a black-bellied plover. See Illust. of Plover.
• noun (Zoöl.) the brown hyena.
• noun One of the twists, or strings, as of fibers, wires, etc., of which a rope is composed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Each of the strings which, twisted together, make up a yarn, rope or cord.
• noun A string.
• noun An individual length of any fine, string-like substance.
• noun electronics A group of wires, usually twisted or braided.
• noun broadcasting A series of programmes on a particular theme or linked subject.
• noun The flat area of land bordering a body of water; a beach or shore.
• verb transitive, nautical To run aground; to beach.
• verb transitive, figuratively To leave (someone) in a difficult situation; to abandon or desert.
• verb transitive, baseball To cause the third out of an inning to be made, leaving a runner on base.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a poetic term for a shore (as the area periodically covered and uncovered by the tides)
• verb bring to the ground
• verb leave stranded or isolated with little hope of rescue
• noun a very slender natural or synthetic fiber