cantilever
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈkantɪliːvə/
Forms: form: cantilevers
form: cantalever
form: cantaliver
Etymology: First attested in the 1660s, probably from cant (“slope, edge, corner”) + lever, but the earliest form (c. 1610) was cantlapper. First element may also be Spanish can (“dog”), an architect's term for an end of timber jutting out of a wall, on which beams rested.
Senses: examples: text: Eventually Sir John Fowler's and Sir Benjamin Baker's continuous steel girder bridge on the cantilever principle was adopted.
ref: 1941 January, the late John Phillimore, “The Forth Bridge 1890-1940”, in Railway Magazine, page 5:
text: He loved Litchfield, Sharon, Williamsburg; he preferred the Georgian, and he had theories about developing a truly American style. He was called a plodder by all the Kivis, and in turn he disliked their bleak blocks of Modernist cement, their glass-fronted hen-houses, their architectural spiders with cantilever claws.
ref: 1951, Sinclair Lewis, World So Wide, Chapter:
text: The underframe, which has been designed to take buffing loads of 200 tons both on the centre coupler and on the retractable side buffers, consists of two centre girders from which cantilevers project to support the solebars, which in turn carry the bodyside structure.
ref: 1951 May, “British Railways Standard Coaches”, in Railway Magazine, page 327:
text: The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread.
ref: 2004, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 10, in The Line of Beauty […], London: Picador, →ISBN:
text: The plank along which pirates made their victims walk was a cantilever. So is a diving board. As you walk along the plank, the unsupported ends dips ^([sic]). It's possible to arrange for two cantilevers to be connected at their unsupported ends, which would let you seamlessly cross from one cantilever to the other while also distributing your weight across both fixed ends.
ref: 2023 May 3, Philip Haigh, “The art and science of building bridges”, in RAIL, number 982, page 40:
topics: architecture
glosses: A beam anchored at one end and projecting into space, such as a long bracket projecting from a wall to support a balcony.
examples: text: Magnetic resonance force microscopy employs an ultrasmall cantilever arm as a platform for specimens that are then moved in and out of proximity to a tiny magnet.
ref: 2009 January 13, John Markoff, “A Breakthrough in Imaging: Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 06 Sep 2019:
glosses: A beam anchored at one end and used as a lever within a microelectromechanical system.
qualifier: figure skating
glosses: A technique, similar to the spread eagle, in which the skater travels along a deep edge with knees bent and bends their back backwards, parallel to the ice.
Derived terms: cantileverable
cantileverage
cantilever arch
cantilever arm
cantilever armchair
cantilever beam
cantilever bra
cantilever bracket
cantilever brake
cantilever bridge
cantilever chair
cantilever circuit
cantilever crane
cantilever fin
cantilever frame
cantilever girder
cantilever landing gear
cantilever moment
cantilever monoplane
cantilever mounting
cantilever roof
cantilever roof bar
cantilever sheet-piles
cantilever single-strut landing gear
cantilever span
cantilever spring
cantilever timbering
cantilever-tower crane
cantilever truss
cantilever-type drilling mast
cantilever wall
cantilever wing
microcantilever
nanocantilever
piezocantilever