Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The hock of a horse or other animal.
- noun A frame used by butchers for hanging carcasses by the legs.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To hang up by means of a gambrel thrust through the legs.
- To form with a curb or crook: as, a gambreled roof.
- noun The hock of a horse or other animal.
- noun A stick crooked like a horse's hind leg, used by butchers for suspending a carcass while dressing it.
- noun A gambrel-roof.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To truss or hang up by means of a gambrel.
- noun The hind leg of a horse.
- noun A stick crooked like a horse's hind leg; -- used by butchers in suspending slaughtered animals.
- noun (Arch.) a curb roof having the same section in all parts, with a lower steeper slope and an upper and flatter one, so that each gable is pentagonal in form.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun obsolete A bar, usually metal, with a central loop and a hook at each end, used to hang a carcass for butchering.
- noun US, architecture A
gambrel roof . - verb To
truss or hang up by means of a gambrel.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a gable roof with two slopes on each side and the lower slope being steeper
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The next roof-form, built from early colonial days, and popular a century ago, was what was known as the gambrel roof.
Home Life in Colonial Days Alice Morse Earle 1881
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Clicking on "gambrel" will take the visitor to a results list including all the photographs with the word "gambrel" in their description.
Archive 2007-04-01 2007
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Clicking on "gambrel" will take the visitor to a results list including all the photographs with the word "gambrel" in their description.
Creating, Managing & Pres. Dig. Assets: Barns of Winnebago County 2007
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Flathead Indian squeezes the child's skull between two boards till it shapes itself into a kind of gambrel-roof against the rain, -- the readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860 Various
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Others occupy separate buildings, almost always of black, unpainted wood, sometimes with the long, sloping roof of Massachusetts, oftener with the quaint "gambrel" of Rhode Island.
Oldport Days 1873
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Massachusetts, oftener with the quaint "gambrel" of Rhode Island.
Oldport Days Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1867
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Then, either with someone holding the back legs, or with the legs secured by a small gambrel, pull on the tail until the hide comes over the head.
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Then, either with someone holding the back legs, or with the legs secured by a small gambrel, pull on the tail until the hide comes over the head.
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I wanted to weigh that buck but had no place to hang my scale and gambrel.
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"We didn't want the house to appear too tall, so we created gambrel roofs on both sides," he says.
Couple's oceanfront house on Bethany Beach is a home for all seasons Deborah K. Dietsch 2010
reesetee commented on the word gambrel
a curved or hipped roof
February 11, 2007
joannasephine commented on the word gambrel
also the crossbar that a carcass is hung from when butchering
October 15, 2008