Trellis
//ˈtɹɛlɪs// noun, verb
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 An outdoor garden frame that can be used for partitioning a common area.
- 2 latticework used to support climbing plants wordnet
- 3 An outdoor garden frame that can be used to grow vines or other climbing plants.
"It was a very warm evening; and the moonlight turned the Thames to an unbroken mirror of silver, and gave to the soft shadows of the shrubs, and the creepers that wound among the trellises, an appearance almost Italian."
- 4 A kind of graph, used in communication theory and encryption, whose nodes are ordered into vertical slices by time, with each node at each time connected to at least one node at an earlier and at least one node at a later time.
Verb
- 1 To train or arrange (plants) so that they grow against a trellis. transitive
"to trellis vines"
- 2 train on a trellis, as of a vine wordnet
Example
More examples"Some ivy is growing on the trellis."
Etymology
From Middle English trelis, from Anglo-Norman treslis, from Old French treille (“arbor”), from Latin trichila (“arbor", "summer house”). However, see OED which claims another Old French form referring to sackcloth, from Vulgar Latin.
Related phrases
More for "trellis"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.