Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A stone or row of stones that constitutes a curb.
- adj. Untrained or unsophisticated; amateurish: a curbstone commentator.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A stone placed against earth or brick- or stonework to prevent it from falling out or spreading.
- n. Specifically, one of the stones set together on edge at the outer side of a sidewalk, forming a curb.
- n. Formerly also spelled kerbstone, kirbstone.
Wiktionary
- n. alternative spelling of kerbstone.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A stone set along a margin as a limit and protection, as along the edge of a sidewalk next the roadway; an edge stone.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a paving stone forming part of a curb
Examples
“For the curbstone was a rocking precipice, and the street below it a grey and shimmering stream, that rolled, and flowed, and rolled, and never rested.”
“The man on the curbstone is the arbiter of our destinies, and the standard man.”
Folkways A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
“The roadside features such as curbstone edges, potholes, streetcar tracks etc. frequently rattle the nerves of any bicyclist.”
“It was also sung on street corners (it was sometimes called "curbstone" harmony) and at social functions and in parlors.”
“Here in Denmark, most bike lanes have their own curbstone to separate them from the nearest car lane.”
“On Marginal Way in Seattle, those curbstone gutters roiled over whitewater kissing the rain clouds' taint.”
“On Broadway they were blowing paper to the curbstone for collection.”
“So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the curbstone and by furtive glances directing my progress.”
“My doll was prissing down the street one night more fifty years ago, kicked up her heels too high, fell against the curbstone and fracturing her femur.”
“From the time most of them threw a curbstone through a window or set fire to their middle school or boosted a car and drove it across spike strips at one hundred miles an hour, they were looking for a way to punch a hole in the dimension and return to a place where people grunted in front of their caves and knocked down their food with a rock.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘curbstone’.
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I Can't Believe It's Not Listed
Words that, at the I put them here, weren't being listed by anyone else in the entire universe.
vagus, neoplanet, fadiddy, cazique, catastroika, circumciser, commonplace book, danseuse, ecopod, dichloroacetate, underlay, overlay and 374 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, C
cryptoxanthin, convent, calcar, chuckle, campanile, covet, complexion, campestral, chirography, counterscarp, caliginous, catabolism and 722 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for curbstone.
bilby How about curb-idle stop screw? Sep 23, 2009
sionnach curbstone consultation, curbstone interview, curbstone research?
I have it in my head that there is some curbstone-related term whose meaning is 'cursory', 'superficial', 'incomplete', if not completely 'madeupical'. The derivation being from paid census-takers who would just fill in forms for the households they were supposed to be interviewing without ever actually performing the interviews - thus, from the 'curb'.
Am I imagining this, or has anyone else heard a similar term in this context? A google search yields a few roughly similar uses of the term 'curbstone consultation' in a medical context. Sep 23, 2009
bilby "Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house. As he drew near he thought how often he had seen it blazing with lights, its steps awninged and carpeted, and carriages waiting in double line to draw up at the curbstone."
- Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'. Sep 19, 2009