hinge

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A jointed or flexible device that allows the turning or pivoting of a part, such as a door or lid, on a stationary frame.
2. n. A similar structure or part, such as one that enables the valves of a bivalve mollusk to open and close.
3. n. A small folded paper rectangle gummed on one side, used especially to fasten stamps in an album.
4. n. A point or circumstance on which subsequent events depend.
5. v. To attach by or equip with or as if with hinges or a hinge.
6. v. To consider or make (something) dependent on something else; predicate: "convenient and misleading fictions for hinging an argument” ( Stephen Jay Gould).
7. v. To be contingent on a single factor; depend: This plan hinges on her approval.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. An artificial movable joint; a device for joining two pieces in such a manner that one may be turned upon the other; the articulation of a door, gate, shutter, lid, etc., to its support, or of two equally movable parts, as of a fire-screen, to each other. A metallic hinge for a door or the like consists of the two leaves or straps, the knuckle or rounded and perforated projection in alternate parts at their inner ends, by which they are joined, and the pin or pintle which passes through the knuckle and on which the hinge turns.
2. n. A natural movable joint; an anatomical articulation turning in a single plane, as that of the knee or of a bivalve shell. See hinge-joint, and cut under bivalve.
3. n. Figuratively, that on which anything depends or turns; a cardinal or controlling principle, rule, or point.
4. n. One of the cardinal points, north, south, east, or west.
5. n. In entomology, the cardo or basal part of the maxilla. See cut under Insecta.
6. To furnish with hinges; join by means of hinges, literally or figuratively.
7. To bend the hinge or hinges of.
8. Figuratively, to cause to depend: as, to hinge one's acceptance upon some future event.
9. To stand, depend, or turn on or as if on a hinge: chiefly figurative.
10. n. In botany, the flexible lamella of the guard-cells of a stoma which renders them mobile.

Wiktionary

1. n. A jointed or flexible device that allows the pivoting of a door etc. See also pintel.
2. n. A stamp hinge, a folded and gummed paper rectangle for affixing postage stamps in an album.
3. n. A point in time, on which subsequent events depend.
4. n. statistics The median of the upper or lower half of a batch, sample, or probability distribution.
5. v. transitive To attach by, or equip with a hinge.
6. v. intransitive To depend on something.
7. v. transitive archaeology The breaking off of the distal end of a knapped stone flake whose presumed course across the face of the stone core was truncated prematurely, leaving not a feathered distal end but instead the scar of a nearly perpendicular break.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The hook with its eye, or the joint, on which a door, gate, lid, etc., turns or swings; a flexible piece, as a strip of leather, which serves as a joint to turn on.
2. n. That on which anything turns or depends; a governing principle; a cardinal point or rule.
3. n. rare One of the four cardinal points, east, west, north, or south.
4. v. To attach by, or furnish with, hinges.
5. v. obsolete To bend.
6. v. To stand, depend, hang, or turn, as on a hinge; to depend chiefly for a result or decision or for force and validity; -- usually with on or upon.

WordNet 3.0

1. v. attach with a hinge
2. n. a circumstance upon which subsequent events depend
3. n. a joint that holds two parts together so that one can swing relative to the other