What does "aventail" mean?

A curtain or flap of mail, fastened to a helmet, or to a coif (hood) of mail, covering the lower face, neck, and shoulders.

What is a synonym for "aventail"?

Common synonyms include: ventail, camail, camail.

Aventail

//ˈævənteɪl// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A curtain or flap of mail, fastened to a helmet, or to a coif (hood) of mail, covering the lower face, neck, and shoulders.
"[…] the hood was increasingly replaced with a mail curtain (the camail or aventail) suspended from the outside of the bascinet, and the bascinet thus augmented gradually replaced the clumsy great helm as the principal defense […]"
2
a medieval hood of mail suspended from a basinet to protect the head and neck wordnet
3
Synonym of ventail (“movable (solid plate) front to a helmet”).

Synonyms

All synonyms

ventail camail camail

Example

More examples

"[…] the hood was increasingly replaced with a mail curtain (the camail or aventail) suspended from the outside of the bascinet, and the bascinet thus augmented gradually replaced the clumsy great helm as the principal defense […]"

Etymology

From Middle English aventayle, from Old French esventail (“air-hole”), from esventer (Modern French éventer), from Latin ex (“out”) + ventus (“wind”). Related to ventail.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.