Cornice meaning

Noun: cornice

Pronunciation: (kor-nis)

Cornice meaning:

• A horizontal moulded projection crowning a building or structure.
• A moulding round the wall of a room just below the ceiling.
• The topmost projecting part of an entablature

Verb (used with object) : cornice

Cornice meaning: to furnish or finish with a cornice.

Synonyms : eaves, pelmet , valance

Origin : Italian

Usage samples and Quotations:  Around The World In Eighty Days by Verne, Jules  – A second group of artists disposed themselves on these long appendages, then a third above these, then a fourth, until a human monument reaching to the very cornices of the theater soon arose on top of the noses.

 Poor Folk by Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Yes, I perceived that a corner of the curtain in your window had been looped up and fastened to the cornice as I had suggested should be done; and it seemed to me that your dear face was glimmering at the window, and that you were looking at me from out of the darkness of your room, and that you were thinking of me.

Janet Plitt – I placed the bottom edge of the cornice board at the very top of the window. It allowed the swags to drop eight inches lower and balance with the green paint.

John Updike – The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.

Shirley Jackson – No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.

Sample sentences:

1. He proposed to replace the cornice on the existing building.
2. On the top of the wall lay a structure of burnt brick, about a foot and a half in height, under the tiles and projecting like a coping when the tiles on the roof are broken or thrown down by the wind so that rain-water can leak through, this burnt brick coating will prevent the crude brick from being damaged, and the cornice -like projection will throw off the drops beyond the vertical face, and thus the walls, though of crude brick structure, will be preserved intact.
3. To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
4. They find seven cornices on which penitent and redeemed sinners are cleansed by the grace of God.
5. They have decorated the cornice with colored terracotta slabs so that it would look beautiful.
6. That shrine comprises of a cornice and a very large dome upheld by the pillars.
7. The mason and the workers have finished constructing the cornice of the building.
8. The walls are crowned by elaborate cornice of wooden bracketing.
9. The cornice of this building has been replaced recently.
10. That reformer of architecture began at the cornice instead of foundation.