curtain

Forms

1.A piece of cloth covering a window, bed, etc. to offer privacy and keep out light.
- He drew the curtains at 11:00pm before falling asleep.
2.A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.
3.The flat area of wall which connects two bastions or towers; the main area of a fortified wall.
- Captain Rense, beleagring the Citie of Errona for us, […] caused a forcible mine to be wrought under a great curtine of the walles […].
4.The beginning of a show; the moment the curtain rises.
- He took so long to shave his head that we arrived 45 minutes after curtain and were denied late entry.

1.To cover (a window) with a curtain; to hang curtains.
- The window, softly curtained with dotted swiss, became the focus of my desperate hour-by-hour attention.
2.To hide, cover or separate as if by a curtain.
- But bleakness still curtained the gray horizon.
- He saw a rock that pierced the shifting waters / As they stilled, now curtained by the riding / Of the waves, and leaped to safety on it.
- But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.

Rare· #4222

Inherited from Middle English curtine

From Old French cortine

From Late Latin cōrtīna (“curtain”), a calque from Ancient Greek.