- 1尖塔、尖頂(教堂塔樓上方那個又高又細、頂端收成一點的屋頂)。注意中文常把整座塔說成「尖塔」,但英文 spire 只指上面那個尖的部分。
A spire is the tall, narrow, pointed roof that sits on top of a tower and rises to a sharp point at the very top — most on a church. When you look at an old European town from a distance and see thin points sticking up above the roofs, those are spires, and that is exactly how the word is usually used: as the thing you see first and from far away. English writers lean on it for that reason ('the spires of the city', 'a village spire above the trees'), and Oxford's old nickname is 'the city of dreaming spires'. Keep two things separate: the TOWER is the square or round building part that holds the bells; the SPIRE is the pointed cap on top. A church can have a tower with no spire. The word can also be stretched to any tall thin pointed shape — a rock spire on a mountain, spires of glass in a modern city — but the church picture is the home meaning.
組成From Old English spīr, 'a point, a tip, a stalk', from Proto-Germanic *spīrō. Related words survive in Dutch spier, German Spiere, Danish spir and Swedish spira. The old sense is simply 'something that tapers to a point'.
原始詞典資料14 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,摘錄並精簡格式,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
spirenoun詞源 1/spaɪə/
- 1
archaicThe stalk or stem of a plant.
- 2
A young shoot of a plant; a spear.
- Clara had pulled a button from a hollyhock spire, and was breaking it to get the seeds.
- 3
Any of various tall grasses, rushes, or sedges, such as the marram, the reed canary-grass, etc.
- 4
A sharp or tapering point.
- A beech wood with silver firs in it rolled down the face of the hill, and the maze of leafless twigs and dusky spires cut sharp against the soft blueness of the evening sky.
- This park’s strange and beautiful rock formations were formed by the Yellowstone River and various streams that have cut through the rock over millions of years, carving out hoodoos, spires and caprocks. The name Makoshika comes from a Lakota word for badlands.
- 5
architectureA tapering structure built on a roof or tower, especially as one of the central architectural features of a church or cathedral roof.
- The spire of the church rose high above the town.
- 6
The top, or uppermost point, of anything; the summit.
- the spire and top of praises
- 7
businessminingA tube or fuse for communicating fire to the charge in blasting.
spireverb詞源 1/spaɪə/
- 1
to sprout, to send forth the early shoots of growth; to germinate.
- In gentle Ladies breste and bounteous race / Of woman kind it fayrest Flowre doth spyre, / And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.
- It is not so apt to spire up as the other sorts, being more inclined to branch into arms.
- 2
To grow upwards rather than develop horizontally.
- 3
To furnish with a spire.
spireverb詞源 2/spaɪə/
- 1
obsoleteTo breathe.
spirenoun詞源 3/spaɪə/
- 1
One of the sinuous foldings of a serpent or other reptile; a coil.
- A dragon's fiery form bely'd the god: Sublime on radiant spires he rode.
- 2
A spiral.
- 3
geometrymathematicssciencesThe part of a spiral generated in one revolution of the straight line about the pole.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary,已精簡格式;依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用,改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。