curtain
English
Etymology
From Middle English curteyn, corteyn, cortyn, cortine, from Old French cortine, from Medieval Latin cōrtīna (“curtain”), from Latin cohors (“court, enclosure”).
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈkɜːtn̩/
Audio (UK) (file)
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈkɝtn̩/, [ˈkɝʔn̩]
Audio (US) (file)
- Rhymes: -ɜː(r)tən
- Homophone: Kirton
Noun
curtain (plural curtains)
- A piece of cloth covering a window, bed, etc. to offer privacy and keep out light.
- 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., 55 Fifth Avenue, [1933], OCLC 2666860, page 0016:
- Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire.
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- A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.
- 1905, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, chapter 2, in The Lisson Grove Mystery:
- “H'm !” he said, “so, so—it is a tragedy in a prologue and three acts. I am going down this afternoon to see the curtain fall for the third time on what […] will prove a good burlesque ; but it all began dramatically enough. It was last Saturday […] that two boys, playing in the little spinney just outside Wembley Park Station, came across three large parcels done up in American cloth. […]”
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- (fortifications) The flat area of wall which connects two bastions or towers; the main area of a fortified wall.
- 1603, John Florio, transl.; Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, […], printed at London: By Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], OCLC 946730821:, Folio Society, 2006, vol.1, p.220:
- Captain Rense, beleagring the Citie of Errona for us, […] caused a forcible mine to be wrought under a great curtine of the walles […].
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- (euphemistic, also "final curtain") Death.
- 1979, Monty Python, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
- For life is quite absurd / And death's the final word / You must always face the curtain with a bow.
- 1979, Monty Python, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
- (architecture) That part of a wall of a building which is between two pavilions, towers, etc.
- (obsolete, derogatory) A flag; an ensign.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Shakespeare to this entry?)
Derived terms
Translations
piece of cloth covering a window
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piece of cloth in a theater
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
Verb
curtain (third-person singular simple present curtains, present participle curtaining, simple past and past participle curtained)
- To cover (a window) with a curtain; to hang curtains.
- 1891, Thomas Hardy, chapter IV, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented [...] In Three Volumes, volume I, London: James R[ipley] Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., […], OCLC 13623666, phase the first (The Maiden), pages 40–41:
- In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs. Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking vinous bliss; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott, and frequenters of this retreat.
- 1985, Carol Shields, "Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls" in The Collected Stories, Random House Canada, 2004, p. 163,
- The window, softly curtained with dotted swiss, became the focus of my desperate hour-by-hour attention.
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- (figuratively) To hide, cover or separate as if by a curtain.
- c. 1593, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 2,
- And, after conflict such as was supposed / The wandering prince and Dido once enjoy'd, / When with a happy storm they were surprised / And curtain'd with a counsel-keeping cave, / We may, each wreathed in the other's arms, / Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber;
- 1840, Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"
- But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.
- 1958, Ovid, The Metamorphoses, translated by Horace Gregory, New York: Viking, Book IV, Perseus, p. 115,
- He saw a rock that pierced the shifting waters / As they stilled, now curtained by the riding / Of the waves, and leaped to safety on it.
- 2003, A. B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride (2001), translated by Hillel Halkin, Harcourt, Part 2, Chapter 17, p. 115,
- But bleakness still curtained the gray horizon.
- c. 1593, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 2,
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