lantern

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. An often portable case with transparent or translucent sides for holding and protecting a light.
2. n. A decorative casing for a light, often of paper.
3. n. A light and its protective or decorative case.
4. n. The room at the top of a lighthouse where the light is located.
5. n. Obsolete A lighthouse.
6. n. A structure built on top of a roof or dome with open or windowed walls to admit light and air.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A case, generally transparent or translucent, inclosing a light and protecting it from the wind and rain, and either portable or fixed. The earliest form appears to have been a collapsing corrugated tube of some semitransparent fabric inclosing a lamp or candle. This form snrvives in the Chinese paper lanterns. Lanterns have been made of horn, talc, mica, perforated metals, oiled fabrics, paper, and glass.
2. n. The glass casing surrounding the lamp of a lighthouse and forming the upper member of the structure.
3. n. In architecture, specifically, an upright skylight in the roof of a building. It is distinguished from an ordinary skylight in that it has vertical sides. Of this nature is the open tower often placed, especially in English church architecture, at the junction of the cross in a cruciform plan. Such a lantern has the whole or a considerable part of the interior open to view from below, and receives light from a range of windows extending entirely around it. The name is also applied to a more or less open construction on the top of a tower, or crowning a dome, although not serving to admit light to the interior; also to a louver. See cuts under dome and domical.
4. n. In the quadrant electrometer, the part of the case of the instrument which surrounds the mirror and suspension-fibers.
5. n. A device for inclosing fabrics in the process of dyeing, to fix the colors by the aid of steam.
6. n. A workmen's name for a short perforated core used in making hollow castings.
7. n. A kind of cog-wheel. See lantern-wheel.
8. n. The whiff, a fish, which is semi-transparent when held up against the light.
9. n. The Trigla obscura, a fish of the subfamily Triglinæ. Also called lantern-gurnard.
10. To furnish with a lantern; light as by means of a lantern: as, to lantern a lighthouse.
11. To put to death by hanging to a lamp-post (French lanterne): a frequent incident during the first French revolution.
12. n. The misshapen proboscis (formerly supposed to be luminous) of many tropical Fulgoridæ or so-called ‘lantern-flies.’

Wiktionary

1. n. A case of translucent or transparent material made to protect a flame, or light, used to illuminate its surroundings.
2. v. transitive To furnish with a lantern.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Something inclosing a light, and protecting it from wind, rain, etc.; -- sometimes portable, as a closed vessel or case of horn, perforated tin, glass, oiled paper, or other material, having a lamp or candle within; sometimes fixed, as the glazed inclosure of a street light, or of a lighthouse light.
2. n. An open structure of light material set upon a roof, to give light and air to the interior.
3. n. A cage or open chamber of rich architecture, open below into the building or tower which it crowns.
4. n. A smaller and secondary cupola crowning a larger one, for ornament, or to admit light; such as the lantern of the cupola of the Capitol at Washington, or that of the Florence cathedral.
5. n. (Mach.) A lantern pinion or trundle wheel. See Lantern pinion (below).
6. n. (Steam Engine) A kind of cage inserted in a stuffing box and surrounding a piston rod, to separate the packing into two parts and form a chamber between for the reception of steam, etc.; -- called also lantern brass.
7. n. (Founding) A perforated barrel to form a core upon.
8. n. (Zoöl.) See Aristotle's lantern.
9. v. To furnish with a lantern.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. light in a transparent protective case