window-sill
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: window-sills
Senses: examples: text: After amusing herself for a brief time with picking to pieces some mignonette which filled a box on the window-sill, Marie threw the flowers from her, and exclaimed,—"And here we are seated together, as we used to talk away half the night in Italy. Good Heavens! how we are altered!"
ref: 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter I, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume II, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 2:
text: Suddenly a beautiful delf blue-and-white flower-pot, which had been set on the window-sill of an upper storey, fell to the ground with a crash, and the fragments spluttered up around my father's legs.
ref: 1848 April – 1849 October, E[dward] Bulwer-Lytton, chapter IV, in The Caxtons: A Family Picture, volume I, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, published 1849, →OCLC, part I, page 26:
text: Spite of the dark cloud which in those Puritan days overhung all diversions and every cheerful pastime, the little book won its way to many a sunny window-sill in English country-houses, and accompanied many anglers to the water side; for in two years' time another edition was required.
ref: 1876 May 24, Rev. M[organ] G[eorge] Watkins, “Izaak Walton”, in Fraser's Magazine, page 633:
text: In Walachia, green sods are laid on the window-sills and on the lintels of the doors to avert the uncanny crew [i.e. witches].
ref: 1890, James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, volume 2, page 338:
text: Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
ref: 1914, Mary Roberts Rinehart, chapter 25, in The Street of Seven Stars:
text: Another person owns a flower-potful of earth on his window-sill—but he has to pay rent for the space it occupies.
ref: 1918 November 30, R. Shaw, “Monopoly to Follow the Knock-Out of Despotism”, in Middleton Guardian, number 2,405, page 2:
text: […] he sat up and shook his ears once or twice, and then sprang lightly off the window-sill and began to mountaineer about the contents of the garret.
ref: 1940, Sylvia Townsend Warner, “The Castle of Carabas”, in Barbara Silverberg, editor, Kitten Caboodle: A Collection of Feline Fiction, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, published 1969, page 124:
text: There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead blue-bottle on the window-sill.
ref: 1950, C[live] S[taples] Lewis, “Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe”, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe […], London: Geoffrey Bles, →OCLC:
text: I was going to boak: I made the window and opened it but most of the sickness hit the window-sill in a heap.
ref: 1997, Alan Warner, Movern Callar
text: The more superficial beholder of the book's cover (a magnificent piece of artistry by the Venetian painter Gabriel Bella) will have failed to notice, on its continuation overleaf, the employee of an ancient jeu de paume who, having scaled the slanting roof of the gallery, is busily retrieving from the dusty recesses of the window-sill the stray tennis balls from below.
ref: 1998, Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis:Cultural History, page xi:
glosses: Alternative form of windowsill.