curtain

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Material that hangs in a window or other opening as a decoration, shade, or screen.
2. n. Something that functions as or resembles a screen, cover, or barrier: the curtain of mist before the mountain; a heavy curtain of artillery fire.
3. n. The movable screen or drape in a theater or hall that separates the stage from the auditorium or that serves as a backdrop.
4. n. The rising or opening of a theater curtain at the beginning of a performance or act.
5. n. The time at which a theatrical performance begins or is scheduled to begin.
6. n. The fall or closing of a theater curtain at the end of a performance or act.
7. n. The concluding line, speech, or scene of a play or act.
8. n. The part of a rampart or parapet connecting two bastions or gates.
9. n. Architecture A curtain wall.
10. n. Slang The end.
11. n. Slang Absolute ruin: "If the employee doesn't shape up, it's curtains” ( Business Week).
12. n. Slang Death.
13. v. To provide (something) with or as if with a curtain.
14. v. To shut off (something) with or as if with a curtain.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A hanging screen of a textile fabric (or rarely of leather) used to close an opening, as a doorway or an alcove, to shut out the light from a window, and for similar purposes. See blind, shade, portière, lambrequin; also altar-curtain and hanging. Specifically— The large sheet of stuff used to inclose and conceal the stage in a theater. It is usually attached to a roller by its loose extremity, and is withdrawn by rolling it up from below. Hangings of stuff used at the windows of inhabited rooms: sometimes fixed at top, and capable of being looped up below; sometimes secured at top to rings which run on a rod, and therefore capable of being withdrawn toward the sides.
2. n. Hangings used to shut in or screen a bedstead.
3. n. Hence Whatever covers or conceals like a curtain or hangings.
4. n. One of the movable pieces of canvas or other material forming a tent.
5. n. In fortification, that part of a rampart which is between the flanks of two bastions or between two towers or gates, and bordered with a parapet, behind which the soldiers stand to fire on the covered way and into the moat. See cuts under bastion and crown-work.
6. n. An ensign or flag.
7. n. In mycology, same as cortina.
8. n. A plate in a lock designed to fall over the keyhole as a mask to prevent tampering with the lock.
9. n. The leaden plate which divides into compartments the large leaden chamber in which sulphuric acid is produced by the oxidation of sulphurous compounds in the ordinary process of manufacture.
10. To inclose with or as with curtains; furnish or provide with curtains.
11. n. In hydraul. engm., a woven fabric of brushwood or withes, such as branches of willows, placed in a stream to retard the current and permit the deposition of silt, or to compel scour and remove it.
12. n. A vertical fold of the mantle within the margins of the valves of certain pelecypods (the pectens).
13. n. In architecture, a wall which serves as an inclosure rather than as a support. Thus the wall beneath a large window, as in a church, or that between two buttresses which carry the vault and roof without its assistance, is a curtain.

Wiktionary

1. n. A piece of cloth covering a window to keep the sun from shining inside.
2. n. A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.
3. n. fortifications The flat area of wall which connects two bastions or towers; the main area of a fortified wall.
4. n. euphemistic death
5. v. To cover (a window) with a curtain; to hang curtains.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A hanging screen intended to darken or conceal, and admitting of being drawn back or up, and reclosed at pleasure; esp., drapery of cloth or lace hanging round a bed or at a window; in theaters, and like places, a movable screen for concealing the stage.
2. n. (Fort.) That part of the rampart and parapet which is between two bastions or two gates. See Illustrations of Ravelin and Bastion.
3. n. (Arch.) That part of a wall of a building which is between two pavilions, towers, etc.
4. n. obsolete A flag; an ensign; -- in contempt.
5. v. To inclose as with curtains; to furnish with curtains.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. any barrier to communication or vision
2. v. provide with drapery
3. n. hanging cloth used as a blind (especially for a window)