Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An upright ornament along the eaves of a tiled roof designed to conceal the joints between the rows of tiles.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In class. arch., an upright ornament, generally of marble or terra cotta, placed at the eaves of a tiled roof, at the end of the last imbrex or tile of each ridge of tiling, to conceal the joining of the tiles.
- noun An ornament on a vase so placed as to conceal the part where the handle joins the body.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun An ornament fixed upon a frieze.
- noun An ornament at the eaves, concealing the ends of the joint tiles of the roof.
- noun An ornament of the cymatium of a classic cornice, sometimes pierced for the escape of water.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun architecture The vertical blocks which terminate the covering tiles of the roof of a
Roman ,Etruscan , orGreek temple. - noun architecture Any decoration serving to cover the ends of roofing tiles.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun carved ornament at the eaves of a tile roof concealing the joints between tiles
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word antefix.
Examples
-
We also found a well preserved terra cotta antefix which certainly indicates a very early date for the temple.
-
Close to the back wall, a deposit was exposed with some special finds, such as an antefix (a piece of terracotta roof decoration, being the front of the lowest row of covering tiles, see Find of the Week), a rare type of oil lamp, and several decorated pottery sherds.
-
The antefix has the breadth of a hole and one eighth, and the thickness of one hole.
The Ten Books on Architecture Vitruvius Pollio
-
Terracotta antefix -- the outer face of the lowest tile from a down sloping row of "Corinthian" covering tiles, which covered the curved or upstanding joints of the large horizontal tiles below them, so that no rain could infiltrate the roof).
reesetee commented on the word antefix
A decorated upright slab, fixed vertically at regular intervals along the lower edge of a roof to cover or conceal the open end of a row of tiles. Usually in the form of an anthemion.
January 5, 2008
jmjarmstrong commented on the word antefix
JM is not against fixing the antefix
November 26, 2009