English

Noun

lunette ‎(plural lunettes)

1. (architecture) A small opening in a vaulted roof of a circular or crescent shape. [from 17th c.]
   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 14, in The China Governess:

     Nanny Broome was looking up at the outer wall.  Just under the ceiling there were three lunette windows, heavily barred and blacked out in the normal way by centuries of grime.

   • 1982, Lawrence Durrell, Constance, Faber & Faber 2004 (Avignon Quintet), p. 820:

     Next came the semi-landing with the lunette window, and here the door opened under the pressure of a single finger, and with a sigh and creak.

2. (architecture) A crescent-shaped recess or void in the space above a window or door. [from 18th c.]
   

   a lunette in the Thomas Jefferson building of the US Library of Congress
   • 1930, Offner, Steinweg et al., A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, p. 49:

     The decoration of a lunette discovered in the Duomo of Pistoia in the 1950s, which represents Christ blessing and Saints James and John, all bust-length, constitutes a more remarkable and stylistically more advanced approach to painting.

3. (obsolete) An image or other representation of a crescent moon. [18th-19th c.]
   • 1822, Moses Aaron Richardson, The Local Historian's Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences, vol. 3, p. 245:

     The lesser portions of the tablet has over this Mithras, a lunette or symbol of the moon, who, according to Porphyry's comment, is the queen of generation and as such was denominated by the ancients both a bee and a bull [...].

4. (fortifications) A field work consisting of two projecting faces forming a wedge each of which extends from one of two parallel flanks. [from 18th c.]
   

   two kinds of lunette fortification
   • 1863, Alexander William Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea, vol. VII, p. 185:

     This Lunette, as we have seen, was confronted, and even in siege-form "approached", by a part of Canrobert's army [...].

   • 2001, Anthea Bell, translating WG Sebald, Austerlitz, Penguin 2011, p. 21:

     In mid-December [...], the French succeeded in storming the half-ruined outwork of the St Laurent lunette and advancing to a position immediately beneath the walls with their breaching batteries.

5. (Christianity) A luna: a crescent-shaped receptacle, often glass, for holding the (consecrated) host (the bread of communion) upright when exposed in the monstrance. [from 19th c.]
   • 2001, David Philippart, Basket, Basin, Plate, and Cup: Vessels in the Liturgy, p. 33:

     On those occasions when lunettes, custodia and monstrances are used, the sacristan needs to be sure that the lunette fits into the given monstrance, that the host fits into the lunette, and that the host is put out before Mass for consecration.

6. A type of flattened glass used in watch-making. [from 19th c.]
   • 2008, FJ Garrard, Watch Repairing, Cleaning and Adjusting: A Practical Handbook, p. 157:

     Lunette and double lunette glasses are generally sized in quarters; crystals and thin flat lunettes for hunters in eighths.

7. The circular hole in the guillotine in which the victim's neck is placed. [from 19th c.]
   • 1972, Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, McGraw-Hill 1972, p. 92:

     some "future" events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has already closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

8. (geology) A type of crescent-shaped dune blown up along a lake basin, especially in dry areas of Australia. [from 20th c.]
   • 2003, Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, BCA 2003, p. 403:

     Sticking out of a crescent-shaped sand ridge of a type known as a lunette were some human bones.

   • 2006, John K Warren, Evaporites: Sediments, Resources and Hydrocarbons, p. 31:

     These lunettes are relicts of a Late Pleistocene deflationary period, when the lacustrine hydrology changed from perennial water-filled lakes to dessicated mudflats.

9. (farriery) A half horseshoe, lacking the sponge.
10. A piece of felt to cover the eye of a vicious horse.
11. An iron shoe at the end of the stock of a gun carriage.
12. (in the plural) See lunettes.

Translations

See also

• meniscus

French

Etymology

From lune ‎(“moon”) +‎ -ette.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /lynɛt/

Noun

lunette f ‎(plural lunettes)

1. (astronomy) telescope (refracting telescope)
2. (architecture) lunette
3. toilet seat
4. (ornithology) breastbone
5. (in the plural) eyeglasses, spectacles

See also

• télescope

Italian

Noun

lunette f pl

1. plural of lunetta