cincture

American  

[singk-cher] / ˈsɪŋk tʃər /

noun

1. a belt or girdle.

2. something that surrounds or encompasses as a girdle does; a surrounding border.

   The midnight sky had a cincture of stars.

3. (on a classical column) a fillet at either end of a shaft, especially one at the lower end.

4. the act of girding or encompassing.

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verb (used with object)

cinctured, cincturing

1. to gird with or as if with a cincture; encircle; encompass.

cincture British  

/ ˈsɪŋktʃə /

noun

1. something that encircles or surrounds, esp a belt, girdle, or border

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Other Word Forms

• uncinctured
  adjective

Etymology

Origin of cincture

< Latin cinctūra, equivalent to cinct ( us ) ( cinc-, variant stem of cingere to gird, cinch ¹ + -tus past participle suffix) + -ūra -ure

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

cincture cinctured cincturing

The institution has a lot of baggage, as any organization with nearly two millennia and a few crusades under its cincture is bound to have.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 22, 2025

Monsignor Charles Portelli, who was Pell’s master of ceremonies at the time of the offending, demonstrated to jurors how the cincture was tied around the waist.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 1, 2019

Over his regular clothes, Pell would wear a full-length white robe called an alb that was tied around his waist with a rope-like cincture.

From Fox News ● Feb. 26, 2019

For the ceremony, the Pope wore the bloodstained cincture that Romero had been wearing when he was killed.

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 22, 2018

A simple-appearing mechanism was the car, consisting of a twelve-foot sphere of the same bronze-like metal that made up the meteor, with a huge wheel, like a bronze cincture, around its middle.

From Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 by Various

Eighteen hundred feet up the Blue Ridge, hard by Snicker's Gap, where Turner Ashby's grey cavalry thundered through to join Jackson in the Valley, stands a fine brick building faced with ten cinctured columns.

From Time Magazine Archive

Millner, as mechanically, took one of the virginally cinctured cigars, and began to undo its wrappings.

From Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton

Nor warrior yet, nor cinctured matron knew Of all in Ilium aught of their approach, Cassandra sole except.

From The Iliad of Homer Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper by William Cowper

Is it a dream or ghost  Of a dream that comes to me, Here in the twilight on the coast,  Blue cinctured by the sea?

From The Little Book of Modern Verse; a selection from the work of contemporaneous American poets by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements are also of gold.

From Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 by H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft

Doctor Douglass drew closer, and asked: "Will you let me stay also, and enjoy with you the wonderful charm of this opalescent air, this beautiful cincturing sea?"

From At the Mercy of Tiberius by Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans