What does "overplate" mean?

In armour, a large pauldron protecting the shoulder, or a cubitiere protecting the elbow.

Overplate

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Noun

1
In armour, a large pauldron protecting the shoulder, or a cubitiere protecting the elbow.
2
A layer of metal that covers an undercoat.
"Fatigue or cracking due to cyclic loading of the overplate is influenced by its thickness."
3
A flat protective sheet that covers something
"The next phase is to adapt a wax sheet to fit against the vertical flange of the stage, so forming an overplate."
4
A tectonic plate that has moved over and covered another tectonic plate.
"The once near-surface rocks will be relatively more oxidised, so that the fluids will tend to oxidise the overplate and, consequently will not precipitate silica but rather dissolve it."

Verb

1
To form an overplate.
"Pits in the nickel plate were introduced by accelerated corrosion testing and the casting was overplated with copper before sectioning."
2
To move on top of and cover another tectonic plate.
"Reflectance spectroscopy (Roush and others, 1993) suggests Mars has a dominantly basaltic crust, but this result may apply only to the surficial rocks, which could be overplated basalt (Lowman, 1989)."
3
To form an overly thick plate on top of something.
"A comparison is shown in figure 1 where it can be seen that with positive photoresist (top) the solder is overplated and with thick negative photoresist (bottom) the solder remains in the photresist pattern."

"Fatigue or cracking due to cyclic loading of the overplate is influenced by its thickness."

From over- + plate.

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