Voussoir
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 One of a series of wedge-shaped bricks or stones forming an arch or vault.
"It is the voussoir depth in a real arch which enables the arch to carry wider ranges of loading; a large number of different idealized centre-line arches can be contained within a given practical profile. ...[T]his must be so, or no mediaeval bridge would have survived its decentering."
- 2 wedge-shaped stone building block used in constructing an arch or vault wordnet
Example
More examples"It is the voussoir depth in a real arch which enables the arch to carry wider ranges of loading; a large number of different idealized centre-line arches can be contained within a given practical profile. ...[T]his must be so, or no mediaeval bridge would have survived its decentering."
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from French voussoir, from Old French vosoir, from Vulgar Latin *volsorium, from *volsus, from Latin volvō (“I roll”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.