[perh. a. Norse flo layer, level piece (Ivar Aasen):—ON. fló fem. The usual Da. word for (ice-)floe is flage = FLAW sb.1]
1. A sheet of floating ice, of greater or less extent; a detached portion of a field of ice. Also ice-floe.
1817. Scoresby, in Ann. Reg., Chron., 531. Pieces of very large dimensions, but smaller than fields, are called floes—thus, a field may be compared to a pack, and a floe to a patch, as regards their size and external form. Ibid. (1823), North. Whale Fishery, 71. We came to the edge of a heavy floe, 8 or 10 miles in diameter, near which three or four large whales were seen.
1857. E. Parry, Mem. Sir W. E. Parry, iv. 85. One of the whalers, which still accompanied them, was crushed between two moving floes, and the crew barely escaped with their lives.
1878. A. H. Markham, Gt. Frozen Sea, i. 2. And very necessary was it that they should possess strength and powers of resistance of no ordinary kind, for they were destined to grapple and fight with the heavy and unyielding ice floes of the Polar Ocean.
transf. 1886. Hall Caine, Son of Hagar, II. xiii. The moon might fly behind the cloud floes and her light burst forth afresh; but for him all was blank night.
2. attrib. and Comb., as floe-edge; floeberg, a berg composed of floe-ice: floe-flat, a seal = floe rat; floe-ice (see quot. 1882); floe-rat, a sealer’s name for the small ringed seal (Phoca hispida).
1878. E. L. Moss, Shores Polar Sea, Descr. Plate xii. The great stratified masses of salt ice that lie grounded along the shores of the Polar Sea are nothing more than fragments broken from the edges of the perennial floes. We called them *floebergs in order to distinguish them from, and express their kinship to, icebergs—the latter and their parent glaciers belong to more southern regions.
1856. Kane, Arct. Expl., I. vii. 72. We perceived that they were at some distance from the *floe-edge, and separated from it by an interval of open water.
1883. Fisheries Exhib. Catal. (ed. 4), 173. Harbour Ranger or *Floe Flat.
1853. Kane, Grinnell Exp., vii. (1856), 52. A vast plain of undulating ice…. This was the *floe ice; perhaps a tongue from the ‘Great Pack,’ through which we are now every day expecting to force our way.
1880. Standard, 20 May, 3. Of the *‘floe-rat’ the Greenlanders kill every year about fifty-one thousand.
