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ference to a unit area of the cross section of the substance, as the number of pounds per square inch, or kilograms per square centimeter, necessary to produce rupture.

for stretching cloth by means of hooks, called tenter-hooks, so that it may dry even and square. Tenter ground, a place where tenters are erected. -- Tenter-hook, a sharp, hooked nail used for fastening cloth on a tenter. -- To be on the tenters, or on the tenter-hooks, to be on the stretch; to be in distress, uneas…

To form into squares or checkers; to lay with checkered work. The floors are sometimes of wood, tessellated after the fashion of France. Macaulay.

Formed of little squares, as mosaic work; checkered; as, a tessellated pavement.

A small piece of marble, glass, earthenware, or the like, having a square, or nearly square, face, used by the ancients for mosaic, as for making pavements, for ornamenting walls, and like purposes; also, a similar piece of ivory, bone, wood, etc., used as a ticket of admission to theaters, or as a certificate for succ…

Diversified by squares; done in mosaic; tessellated. [Obs.] Sir R. Atkyns (1712).

A plane figure having four sides and angles; a quadrangle, as a square, a rhombus, etc.

Of or pertaining to a tetragon; having four angles or sides; thus, the square, the parallelogram, the rhombus, and the trapezium are tetragonal fingers.

A single piece or squared stick of wood intended for building, or already framed; collectively, the larger pieces or sticks of wood, forming the framework of a house, ship, or other structure, in distinction from the covering or boarding. So they prepared timber . . . to build the house. 1 Kings v. 18. Many of the timb…

In France, a light-wheeled vehicle with square or rounded body and rear entrance.

A three-square float (file) used by comb makers.

In a square-rigged vessel, the sail next above the lowermost sail on a mast. This sail is the one most frequently reefed or furled in working the ship. In a fore-and-aft rigged vessel, the sail set upon and above the gaff. See Cutter, Schooner, Sail, and Ship. Topsail schooner. (Naut.) See Schooner, and Illustration in…

In surveys of the public land of the United States, a division of territory six miles square, containing 36 sections.

to another of the same area or solidity, but of a different form, as of a triangle into a square. [R.]

cap, the cap worn by studens at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, having a stiff, flat, square appendage at top. A similar cap used in the United States is called Oxford cap, mortar board, etc. -- Trencher fly, a person who haunts the tables of others; a parasite. [R.] L'Estrange. -- Trencher friend, one who freque…

A draughtsman's square in the form of a right-angled triangle.

Full; also, trim; neat. [Prov. Eng. & Scot.] To sit on a horse square and trig. Brit. Quart. Rev.

nets distant from each other 120 degrees, or one third of the zodiac; trigon. In sextile, square, and trine. Milton.

A movable building, of a square form, consisting of ten or even twenty stories and sometimes one hundred and twenty cubits high, usually moved on wheels, and employed in approaching a fortified place, for carrying soldiers, engines, ladders, casting bridges, and other necessaries.

less than is usual or proper; specifically, to hew, as a piece of timber which should be square, in such a manner that it appears to contain a greater number of cubic feet than it really does contain. Haldeman.