Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A horizontal or transverse beam, especially a structural beam resting on two supports.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A horizontal structural beam that runs perpendicular to the primary support beams; a girder.
- n. A beam laid across the bitts, to which the cable is fastened when riding at anchor.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A girder.
- n. A beam laid across the bitts, to which the cable is fastened when riding at anchor.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A large beam going from wall to wall, or a girder that holds the sides of a building together; any beam that crosses another, or is laid or secured across supports, as in machinery or a ship.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. a horizontal beam that extends across something
Etymologies
Examples
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Dangling by a wire from a crossbeam was a large white cardboard sign.
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Facing Tristan again, she found him sitting casually on the edge of the footbridge railing, one foot propped on a crossbeam, as if waiting on someone to hand him a beer.
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Not that the teenage idiot I was who is, by the way, still swinging freely from a crossbeam and turning a lovely shade of blue would have believed that dopey, feel-good phrase anyway.
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Finally, the guard stopped in front of a small, crudely constructed dwelling built of logs and meant, Isolde guessed, for housing prisoners, because it had a wooden plank door and a heavy crossbeam that when dropped into place would bar the door from the outside.
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Was the makeshift, wonky-looking, floor fan crossbeam still standing atop precarious stacks of pocketbooks at Arcadian?
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The rough centurions with the stale breath who had nailed his wrists to the crossbeam were standing below him, waiting as a group of soldiers using a pulley mechanism lifted the crossbeam up from the ground in several strong yanks, to a height where it could be slotted down into the vertical pole of the crucifix that was permanently implanted at this fearsome site of execution.
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With his arms outstretched like one nailed to the crossbeam of a crucifix, Father Bartholomew lifted off the ground.
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Depending on how deep the notch was cut, the crossbeam might have been flush with the vertical beam, like the cross-stroke on the letter T, or maybe it fit into a deeper slot, forming the traditional four-point cross we see in most religious paintings from the Renaissance period until today.
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Otherwise, the crucified man could fall off the crossbeam as it was being elevated to the vertical beam of the cross.
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The Roman executioners then used forked poles and maybe a pulley to lift the crossbeam up to where it could be slotted into a notch at the top of the vertical beam to form the cross.
Comments
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