mobile

→ Japanese: モバイル (mobairu)

→ Kurtöp: མོ་བའིལ (mobail)

→ Persian: موبایل (mobâil)

From Middle English, from Old French, from Latin mōbilis (“easy to be moved, moveable”), from moveō (“move”).

der

(sculpture) A kinetic sculpture or decorative arrangement made of items hanging so that they can move independently from each other.


ground

en-noun

ground (countable and uncountable, plural grounds)

Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *gʰrem-der.
Proto-Germanic *grunduz
Old English grund
Middle English ground
English ground
From Middle English ground, from Old English grund, from Proto-Germanic *grunduz. Cognate with West Frisian grûn, Dutch grond and German Grund.

etymon

cut the ground from under someone's feet

know one's ass from a hole in the ground

know one's head from a hole in the ground

know the difference between one's ass and a hole in the ground

(sculpture) A flat surface upon which figures are raised in relief.

tausta

sculpture: flat surface upon which figures are raised in relief


bust

en-verb

bust (third-person singular simple present busts, present participle busting, simple past and past participle busted or bust)

busts (present singular third-person)
busting (participle present)
busted (participle past)
busted (past)
bust (participle past)
bust (past)

From Middle English busten, a variant of Middle English bursten, bresten (“to burst”). Compare German Low German basten and barsten (“to burst”). More at burst.

Aaron got busted by the feds for leaking confidential government documents on Reddit.

(transitive, slang) To arrest (someone) for a crime.

He busted huge air off that jump!

(snowboarding) An emphatic synonym of do or get.

A few weeks later, Richard was killed accidentally while busting a wild mustang […]

1997, Charles Oswald, Gone with the Western Wind:

(transitive, slang) To break in (an animal).

Smith hears Nancy's protests - "Don't ... no, please don't." - when Hicock menaces her with "You ever had a man?" Finding Hicock rubbing her thigh as she whimpers in fear, Smith confronts him about his intentions, and Hicock says, "First, I'm going to bust that little girl." Smith tells him no, but Hicock replies, "What do you care? You can bust her too."

2014, Tison Pugh, Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies, page 127:

(transitive, slang) To break in (a woman or girl), to deflower


bust

(slang, dated) A spree, unrestrained revel, or wild party.


snowman

* snow + -man.
* (score of eight; card ranked eight): A typical snowman, built from two balls of snow, resembles a figure eight.

A humanoid figure made with large snowballs stacked on each other. Human traits like a face and arms may be fashioned with sticks (arms), a carrot (nose), and stones or coal (eyes, mouth).


sandcastle

Children learn the importance of water in soil mechanics from an early age. They learn on the beach while making sandcastles. When they use dry sand, their castle flows into a heap even as they lift the bucket. The particles of sand have no cohesion and little friction between them.

2023 June 14, Philip Haigh, “Landslips: NR strives to turn back the tide”, in RAIL, number 985, page 32:

A sculpture made of sand and resembling a miniature castle; typically, but not always, made for fun by a child on a beach.

sandkasteel

a sculpture made of sand and resembling a miniature castle


statue

From Old French statue, from Latin statua, derived from statuō (“set up or erect”). Doublet of statua.

I will raise her statue in pure gold.

c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene iii]:

It’s true, Robert E. Lee was opposed to statues of people like Robert E. Lee! So any city that decides to keep a statue of him should, at the very least, add a speech bubble saying, “You know, I specifically told you all not to do this.”!

2017 October 8, “Confederacy”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 4, episode 26, John Oliver (actor), via HBO:

A three-dimensional work of art, usually representing a person or animal, usually created by sculpting, carving, molding, or casting.

kurçak (or korçak; which may mean 'doll' as well)


heroic

en-adj

heroic (comparative more heroic, superlative most heroic)

more heroic (comparative)
most heroic (superlative)

Partly from Middle French heroïque and partly from Latin hērōicus. By surface analysis, hero + -ic.

(sculpture) Of a size larger than life, but less than colossal.


statuette

Borrowed from French statuette, from statue f + -ette (feminine of the diminutive suffix -et). By surface analysis, statue + -ette (diminutive suffix).

af

-ette<pos:feminine of the diminutive suffix <i class="Latn mention" lang="fr">-et</i>>

surf

[…] may be discovered not far from a charming statuette of Queen Alexandra, and there is also the figurette of King George's elder brother.

1921, The Graphic, volume 103, page 444:

Some statuettes are not monochrome but represent characters. That is why they are called nanofigures.

2019 March 7, Filip, “LEGO Microfigures, Minifigures, and Nanofigures”, in Minifigures Blog:

A small statue, usually a figure much less than life size, especially when of marble or bronze, or of plaster or clay as a preparation for the marble or bronze, as distinguished from a figure in terra cotta etc.


relief

en-noun

relief (countable and uncountable, plural reliefs)

From Italian rilievo, from rilevare (“to raise”), from Latin relevō (“to raise”).

(uncountable) A method of sculpture or other artwork in which shapes or figures protrude from a flat background.

(countable) A sculpture or other artwork made with such a method.


armature

/ˈɑɹ.mə.t͡ʃʊɚ/

/ˈɑɹ.mə.t͡ʃɚ/

Borrowed from Middle French armature, from Latin armātūra (“armour”). Doublet of armor and armure.

(sculpture) A supporting framework in a sculpture.


sculpture

sculpture (usually uncountable, plural sculptures)

From Middle English sculpture, from Old French sculpture, from Latin sculptūra (“sculpture”), from sculpō (“to cut out, to carve in stone”).

There, too, in living sculpture, might be seen / The mad affection of the Cretan queen.

1697, Virgil, “The Sixth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:

(countable) A three dimensional work of art created by shaping malleable objects and letting them harden or by chipping away pieces from a rock (sculpting).

Works of art created by sculpting, as a group.


sculpture

en-verb

sculpture (third-person singular simple present sculptures, present participle sculpturing, simple past and past participle sculptured)

sculptures (present singular third-person)
sculpturing (participle present)
sculptured (participle past)
sculptured (past)

To fashion something into a three-dimensional figure.


totem pole

(sculpture) Native American sculpture made by carving trees.


caryatid

en-noun

caryatid (plural caryatids or caryatides)

/ˌkɛəɹiˈætɪd/

/ˌkæɹiˈætɪd/

From Middle French cariatide, from Latin caryatides, from Ancient Greek Καρυάτιδες (Karuátides), plural of Καρυᾶτις (Karuâtis, “a priestess of Artemis, female figures used as bearing-shafts”), from καρυατίζω (karuatízō, “dance the Karyatid festival dance”) from Καρύαι (Karúai, “a town in Laconia with a temple of Artemis and a festival”).

She wore on the top of her head an upright circular cap that made her resemble a caryatid disburdened, and on other parts of her person strange combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes, of metal, mineral and plant.

A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.

կարիատիդ

a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural element


carving

carving (countable and uncountable, plural carvings)

calving (non-rhotic, Received Pronunciation, trap–bath split)

The carvings on the oak panels were ancient.


statuary

From Latin statuāria (ars) (“(art) of sculpture”), feminine of the adjective statuārius (“of statues”).

bor

Simply on aesthetic grounds I can almost applaud the Victorians’ fig obsessed Bowdlerisation of Greek and Roman statuary.

2012, Ruth Ramsden, chapter 9, in Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot, London: Cutting Edge Press, →ISBN, page 137:


kore

From Ancient Greek κόρη (kórē, “girl, maiden”).

uder

Mus. No 685: Archaic kore of island marble (500-490 B. C.) 4 ft high. Attic work. This kore is not wearing the Ionian smile, but a look of solemn gravity. She does not gather up her robes with the left hand like the other kores,[…].

1966, Spyros Meletzēs, Helenē A. Papadakē, Akropolis and Museum, page 42:

Ducat believes that all the kore plastic vessels wearing transverse himatia ending in stepped folds over the abdomen originate in Rhodes (1966: 72).

1995, Irene Bald Romano, University of Pennsylvania Museum, The Terracotta Figurines and Related Vessels, page 14:

Inscribed dedications often took the form of korai (singular: kore): statues, usually life-size or larger of female figures, generally goddesses.

2002, Matthew Dillon, Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion, page 9:

(art, sculpture) An Ancient Greek statue of a woman, portrayed standing, usually clothed, painted in bright colours and having an elaborate hairstyle.


ice sculpture

en-noun

ice sculpture (countable and uncountable, plural ice sculptures)

(sculpture) temporary, decorative sculpture carved from a block of ice


foo lion

A variant of foo dog reflecting that the animal depicted was intended to be a lion rather than a dog.


strongback

(sculpture) A backing pole used to reinforce and stabilize vertically-oriented sculptures.


foo dog

Possibly a Western invention, from Mandarin 福 (fú, “good fortune”) + English dog. There is no similar word in Chinese itself that uses the word 福, but see English foo and Foo. Compare also Chinese 佛 (“Buddha”), pronounced fo or fu in some varieties.

A stylized lion statue similar to those usually placed in male and female pairs outside imperial Chinese palaces, tombs, temples, etc.


alto-relievo

alto-relievo (countable and uncountable, plural alto-relievos)

From Italian altorilievo (“high relief”).

Nobody is in the great pew of the Clavering family, except the statues of defunct baronets and their ladies: there is Sir Poyntz Clavering, Knight and Baronet, kneeling in a square beard opposite his wife in a ruff: a very fat lady, the Dame Rebecca Clavering, in alto-relievo, is borne up to Heaven by two little blue-veined angels, who seem to have a severe task—and so forth.

1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 15, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

(sculpture) A form of sculpture in which carved figures or other objects protrude from the background.


high relief

high relief (countable and uncountable, plural high reliefs)

(sculpture) A form of classical sculpture in which forms extend from the background by at least half of their depth.


bas-relief

bas-relief (countable and uncountable, plural bas-reliefs)

/ˈbɑː.ɹɪˌliːf/

From French bas-relief, from Italian bassorilievo, compound of basso (“low”) + rilievo (“relief”), from Latin relevare (“to raise up, make light”).

der

(sculpture) A low or mostly-flat sculpture which is carved into a wall, or is in the form of a tile mounted flat to a wall, rather than a fully three-dimensional, free-standing figure.


fluting

(architecture, sculpture) A decoration consisting of parallel, normally vertical, flutes (grooves) incised into the surface.


after-cast

(sculpture) A cast made from a mold taken from an already completed sculpture, often smaller and less detailed than the original.


puntello

(sculpture) One of the points sometimes drilled as guides for cutting away superfluous stone.


salt clay

A dough usually made mainly from salt, flour and water (sometimes with cornstarch), moldable into shapes while soft but which then hardens.

trölladeig

dough made from salt and flour that hardens when dried


snowperson

en-noun

snowperson (plural snowpersons or snowpeople)

snowpersons (plural)
snowpeople (plural)

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-snowperson.wav

For a snowperson, fashion is all in the accessories.

2009 February 4, Jess Cartner-Morley, “What fashionable snowmen are wearing in 2009”, in The Guardian:

You might think of first inversion triads as looking like a snowperson whose feet have been moved above their head [...]

2021 July 1, Chelsey Hamm, Samuel Brady, Open Music Theory, Inversion and Figured Bass:

(uncommon) Snow sculpted into a human figure, a snow figure: a snowman or snowwoman.


snow figure

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-snow figure.wav

Snow sculpted into a human figure, a snowman or snowwoman.


patination

patination (countable and uncountable, plural patinations)

Modern Art Foundry: Sculpture retouching, casting, finishing and patination.

2009 February 26, Madhu Puri, “The Full Picture”, in New York Times:

(sculpture) The application of a patina.


in the round

Noah's ark with animals in the round

1971, Gwen White, Antique Toys And Their Background, page 65:

Not so the sculpture in the round: it stands in ordinary space with the other bodies, a body like them. We must hold fast to this outcome; it will allow us to explain the true essence of sculpture, the designation we confer on sculpture in the round alone. Painting and relief create their own space.

2012 [1920], “The Essence of Sculpture”, in Deborah Shannon, transl., edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts, Modern Sculpture Reader, Getty Publications, translation of Das Wesen der Bildhauerei by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, →ISBN, page 76:

(sculpture) Not attached to a background.


hydrophore

The hydrophore (VI), on the other hand, which is quite well preserved, was probably the work of an artist in Magna Graecia, as Mrs. Tölle-Kastenbein has suggested.

1987, Literature, Music, Fine Arts, volume 21, page 182:

Thusm the ridged eyebrows are very common; to mention only some examples: the Boston and Axos heads just mentioned, the "hydrophore" of the Olive Tree pediment and Zeus of the Introduction gable on the Acropolis, the 'Hera' head in Olympia (Fig. 9), Medusa and Chrysaor of the Corfu gable (Fig. 10) etc.

1997, BABESCH, Bulletin Antieke Beschaving, number 72:

The sculptural type of the hydrophore—a standing female figure represented in the act of holding a water vessel on her head—is well attested across the Greek world, especially continental Greece and Southern Italy.

2015, Robert S. Wagman, The Cave of the Nymphs at Pharsalus: Studies on a Thessalian Country Shrine:

(sculpture) A sculpture of a standing female figure carrying a water vessel on her head.


archaic smile

From archaic + smile, referring to the Archaic period of Ancient Greek art.

(Ancient Greece, art, sculpture, historical) A smiling facial expression commonly found on Greek statues of the Archaic period (circa 700–500 B.C.E.).

Ancient Greece; sculpture; Ancient Greece; sculpture


coelanaglyphic

From coel- (a variant of coelo- (prefix meaning ‘hollow’)) + anaglyphic (“relating to an anaglyph”), modelled after French coilanaglyphique. Coelo- is derived from Ancient Greek κοῖλος (koîlos, “hollow; concave; a cavity, hollow”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱewh₁- (“to swell; to be strong”)), while anaglyphic is derived from anaglyph (“decorative ornament worked in low relief or bas relief”) (from Ancient Greek ἀναγλυφή (anagluphḗ, “a work in low relief”), from ανα- (ana-, prefix meaning ‘above; upward’) + γλῠ́φειν (glŭ́phein) (the active infinitive of γλῠ́φω (glŭ́phō, “to carve, engrave”), from Proto-Indo-European *glewbʰ- (“to split”))) + -ic (suffix meaning ‘of or pertaining to’ forming adjectives from nouns).

der

The varieties of relief are still further distinguished as […] cavo-rilievo, hollow relief, also called intaglio rilevato, or cœlanaglyphic sculpture, an Egyptian form of relief obtained by cutting a furrow with sloping sides around a figure previously outlined on a stone surface, leaving the highest parts of the finished work on a level with the original surface-plane.

1895, “relief”, in William Dwight Whitney, editor, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, volume VI, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC, page 5062, column 1:

The Egyptian column, covered with painted figures from top to bottom, and in many cases wrought with cœlanaglyphic sculptures which are then elaborately treated in colour, was more in itself, shaft and capital taken together, than any column of the Greeks. [Footnote 12: Cœlanaglyphic; also concavo-convex or cavo-rilievo: denoting relief-sculpture which is in a sunken panel, which it fills completely, leaving no background. It is as if a groove were cut around the sculptured figure, which is then wrought into complete modelling; while the background is not cut away, lowered, or abated, as in ordinary relief[…]]

1916, Russell Sturgis, “The Columnar Architecture”, in A History of Architecture, volume I (Antiquity), Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, book I (Ancient Egypt), page 30:

A type of incised relief employed largely by the Egyptians for architectural ornament is the inverse bas-relief, also referred to as coelanaglyphic or Egyptian relief. […] It is an intaglio form in which the figures do not project from the wall, but are cut into it, as on the pylon of the Temple at Philae (Temple of Isis). In this from of intaglio relief, the figures are outlined by means of grooves or furrows cut around the forms. The highest points or portions of the completed work are on a level with the original surface plane.

1947, Jack C. Rich, “The Anatomy of Sculpture”, in The Materials and Methods of Sculpture, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications, published 1988, →ISBN, page 7:

A relief is generally a sculptured surface raised from a background, although the ancient Egyptians, for instance, also devised intaglio relief—that is, sculptured relief within a bordered boundary, referred to as coelanaglyphic relief. The basic characteristic of relief that distinguishes it from sculpture in the round is its physical dependence on some kind of background or matrix.

2003, William H[enry] Gerdts, “The Neoclassic Relief”, in Thayer Tolles, editor, Perspectives on American Sculpture before 1925 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia), New York, N.Y.: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 2, column 2:

Sunken relief is also known as incised, coelanaglyphic, and intaglio relief. It is almost exclusively an ancient Egyptian art form, but some beautiful smallscale Indian examples in ivory have been discovered at Bagrām in Afghanistan.

2017, Cleo Kuhtz, editor, Sculpture: Materials, Techniques, Styles, and Practice (Britannica’s Practical Guide to the Arts), New York, N.Y.: Britannica Educational Publishing, →ISBN:

(sculpture) In the form of cavo-rilievo (“sculpture in relief within a sinking made for the purpose, so no part of it projects beyond the surrounding surface”).

Akhenaten
Nefertiti
William Dwight Whitney


ice carousel

(sculpture) An artificial ice circle, created by cutting a natural floating ice sheet in a body of water into a circle and pushing it so that it spins.


Stone Mountain

Jefferson Davis
Robert E. Lee
Stonewall Jackson
en:Stone Mountain (disambiguation)

A mountain in Appalachians, DeKalb County, Georgia, United States, a quartz monzonite dome monadnock former pluton igneous intrusion, containing the world's largest bas relief, of three Confederate leaders on horseback.


omnifacial

(sculpture) Suitable for viewing from any direction.


basso-relievo

When they were outside of the church, Corinna pointed out to Nelville, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which were represented on the gates in basso-relievo.

1807, [Germaine] de Staël Holstein, translated by D[ennis] Lawler, “[Book IV. Rome.] Chap[ter] III.”, in Corinna; or, Italy. […], volume I, London: […] Corri, […]; and sold by Colburn, […], and Mackenzie, […], →OCLC, page 187: