Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A mount for a crane consisting of a large archlike or bridgelike frame that can be moved, often along a set of tracks.
  • noun A similar spanning frame supporting a group of railway signals over several tracks.
  • noun A massive vertical frame structure used in assembling or servicing a rocket, especially at a launch site.
  • noun A support for a barrel lying on its side.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as gauntree.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun See gauntree.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A framework of steel bars resting on side supports to bridge over or around something.
  • noun A supporting framework for a barrel.
  • noun astronautics A gantry crane or gantry scaffold.
  • noun medical imaging A cylindrical scanner assembly in the bore of which the response of bodies or tissues to some specific exposure can be detected for 3D imaging.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a framework of steel bars raised on side supports to bridge over or around something; can display railway signals above several tracks or can support a traveling crane etc.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English ganter, gauntre, wooden stand for barrels, from Old North French gantier, wooden frame, from Latin canthērius, from Greek kanthēlios, pack ass, from kanthēlia, panniers at the side of a pack-saddle.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French chantier, Late Latin cantarium, from Latin canterius trellis, sort of frame.

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Examples

  • For this scenario, Siplace offers short-term gantry rentals for up to four months, which can be renewed if necessary.

    Electronicstalk - electronics industry news 2010

  • For this scenario, Siplace offers short-term gantry rentals for up to four months, which can be renewed if necessary.

    Electronicstalk - electronics industry news 2010

  • A difference with the Spaceport's installation will be the addition of a mobile gantry, which is to be employed for payload integration with the Soyuz erected in its vertical position.

    SpaceRef Top Stories 2009

  • A further contributing factor is the fact that port equipment such as gantry cranes and straddle carriers, are not readily available in the market and most of the equipment is manufactured overseas on order and therefore generally has a long lead time (20 to 24 months).

    ANC Daily News Briefing 1995

  • Proposals for an open-road "gantry" tolling system on I-80 are due Monday, for example.

    Market News 2008

  • "gantry" is applied to the movable scaffold or frame, which in this case rests upon a pair of rails twenty-three feet apart, one of them being close to the edge of the quay.

    Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 Various

  • Nearby, the Chinese-built deepwater port, with its neat angles, spanking-new gantry cranes, and other cargo-handling equipment, appeared charged with expectation, even as the complex stood silent and empty against the horizon, waiting for decisions from Islamabad.

    Pakistan’s Fatal Shore 2009

  • Those who look up will see the first highway-speed electronic toll gantry in the D.C. region.

    Q&A on Maryland's Intercounty Connector 2011

  • Those who look up will see the first highway-speed electronic toll gantry in the D.C. region.

    Q&A on Maryland's Intercounty Connector 2011

  • At 8 p.m., teams swung open the 13-story rotating gantry at launch pad 39A to expose Discovery for fueling and flight Thursday.

    Discovery unveiled on eve of last launch 2011

Comments

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  • Also the last name of Elmer Gantry, title character of the novel by Sinclair Lewis.

    January 19, 2008

  • Nothing like a bit of ass in your etymology.

    January 4, 2013

  • “Very early on a weekday, before the sun rose over the town of Aalsmeer, I stepped into Royal FloraHolland, the largest flower auction in the world.

    FloraHolland (royal designates a firm that has been in business for more than 100 years) is a single building so large that the numbers describing it make no sense: It covers 1.3 million square meters, 320 acres, the area of 220 football fields. It is one unfathomably large room, but a gantry stretches across it at the level of a second story, for visitors to walk along without getting in the way of business. Suspended in the middle of the gantry is the auction itself, rooms of traders in bleacher seating, wearing headsets and stabbing keyboards, staring at wall-sized screens of flower lots while electronic clocks tick down.“

    —“Killer Tulips Hiding in Plain Sight” The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/when-tulips-kill/574489/

    November 16, 2018