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dome

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Pronunciation

  • IPA: UK /dəʊm/, US /doʊm/[1]

Etymology

In its main sense it is borrowed from French dôme,[2][3][4][5][6] from Occitan doma in Barnhart and Etymonline,[2][3] or from Italian duomo (“cathedral, dome”) in Hoad, Merriam-Webster and the NODE,[4][5][6] ultimately from Ancient Greek δῶμα (dôma, “house, housetop”) or Latin domus (“house”),[2][3][4][7] from Proto-Indo-European *dem- (“house, household”).[3] An earlier English dome, a house or stately building (1513), was taken directly from the Latin word.[2][8][7]

Earliest recorded meaning

A house or stately building: 1513, a sense now only poetic.[8][2][5]

Semantic evolution

A cathedral church is an obsolete sense of 1691, after the Italian and German use of their words for God's house.[8][2][3] The rounded vault forming a roof, the cupola that often crowned the crossing of a cathedral, is from 1656, in Blount's Glossographia.[2][8][3] The vault of a cave or of the sky is from 1727, and a rounded mountain summit from 1788.[8] In geology a dome is a structure whose layers slope away in all directions (1833).[8][9] In slang the head is the dome (1891).[8][10] The verb, to cover with a dome, is from 1876.[5]

Timeline

  • 1513 – a stately building.[8]
  • 1656 – a rounded roof.[2][8]
  • 1691 – a cathedral (obsolete).[8]
  • 1727 – a natural dome.[8]
  • 1891 – the head (slang).[8]

Modern meaning

Noun

  1. A rounded roof or vault, shaped like half a sphere.
  2. Something shaped like this.
  3. (slang) The human head.
  4. (geology) A structure in which rock layers slope away in all directions from a centre.

Verb

  1. To cover with a dome, or to shape like one.

Word family

  • domal
  • domelike
  • astrodome
  • brachydome
  • domical
  • geodome
  • macrodome
  • radome

References

  1. ^ Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  3. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  4. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  5. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  6. ^ a b Pearsall, Judy, ed. (1998), The New Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  7. ^ a b Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  9. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
  10. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), 3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin