cincture
Americannoun
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a belt or girdle.
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something that surrounds or encompasses as a girdle does; a surrounding border.
The midnight sky had a cincture of stars.
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(on a classical column) a fillet at either end of a shaft, especially one at the lower end.
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the act of girding or encompassing.
verb (used with object)
noun
Other Word Forms
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
Vocabulary lists containing cincture
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
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
Each of us were drawn by him, she with the cincture of Venus, and I with the crescent of Dian.
From Ormond, Volume III (of 3) or, The Secret Witness by Brown, Charles Brockden
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
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 Rittenhouse, Jessie Belle
But she wore leggins of doe-skin, deeply fringed with pale green and cinctured in at her waist, where war-axe and knife hung on her left thigh, and powder horn and bullet pouch on her right.
From The Little Red Foot by Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
Her people are arrayed in purple vesture, and wear cloaks of gold; their loins are cinctured with girdles rich with precious stones.
From The Story of Paris by Kimball, Katherine
Presently a fantastic form danced up from behind one of the huts, daubed with colored clays, figged out with a thousand tawdry charms, and cinctured round the middle by a girdle of half-picked bones.
From A Master of Fortune Being Further Adventures of Captain Kettle by Wood, Stanley L.
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 Evans, Augusta J. (Augusta Jane)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
