Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A roof or vault having a circular, polygonal, or elliptical base and a generally hemispherical or semispherical shape.
  • noun A geodesic dome.
  • noun A domelike structure, object, or natural formation.
  • noun Chemistry A form of crystal with two similarly inclined faces that meet at an edge parallel to the horizontal axis.
  • noun Slang The human head.
  • noun Archaic A large, stately building.
  • intransitive verb To cover with or as if with a dome.
  • intransitive verb To shape like a dome.
  • intransitive verb To rise or swell into the shape of a dome.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • An obsolete form of doom.
  • noun In geology, an anticlinal fold whose axis equals or approximates a point; an anticlinal fold with quaquaversal dip. Domes are most commonly produced by laccoliths, but they may be due to intersecting folds.
  • noun A building; a house; especially, a stately building; a great hall; a church or temple.
  • noun In architecture, a cupola; a vault upon a plan circular or nearly so; a hemispherical or approximately hemispherical coving of a building.
  • noun This restricted application of the term arose from the fact that the churches of Italy were almost universally built with a cupola at the intersection of the nave and the transept, or over the sanctuary. In some instances dome may refer equally well to the church or cathedral, or to the cupola which is its most conspicuous feature.
  • noun Anything shaped like a cupola.
  • noun The dome-shaped part of the roof of an astronomical observatory, placed over a telescope.
  • noun In crystallography, a form whose planes intersect the vertical axis, but are parallel to one of the lateral axes: so called because it has above or below a horizontal edge like the roof of a house; also, one of the faces of such a form.
  • To furnish or cover with a dome; give the shape of a dome to.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete Decision; judgment; opinion; a court decision.
  • noun A building; a house; an edifice; -- used chiefly in poetry.
  • noun (Arch.) A cupola formed on a large scale.
  • noun Any erection resembling the dome or cupola of a building; as the upper part of a furnace, the vertical steam chamber on the top of a boiler, etc.
  • noun (Crystallog.) A prism formed by planes parallel to a lateral axis which meet above in a horizontal edge, like the roof of a house; also, one of the planes of such a form.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A common structural element of architecture that resembles the hollow upper half of a sphere, a cupola.
  • noun Anything shaped like an upset bowl, often used as a cover, e.g. a cake dome.
  • noun slang head (including the meaning 'oral sex')

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a stadium that has a roof
  • noun a hemispherical roof
  • noun informal terms for a human head
  • noun a concave shape whose distinguishing characteristic is that the concavity faces downward

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From French dôme, dome, cathedral (from Italian duomo, cathedral, from Latin domus, house; see dem- in Indo-European roots) and from French dôme, roof (from Provençal doma, from Greek dōma, house; see dem- in Indo-European roots).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin doma. Compare French dôme.

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Examples

Comments

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  • slang for a person's skull.

    April 5, 2013