What is "mortise"

Usage examples of "mortise".

Finally, they came flowing forth and I could feel them falling into place, mortise and tenon, key and lock.

Sliprails, or a slip-panel, is a panel of fencing of which the rails are made to be slipped out of the mortise holes in the posts so as to give passage to horses, vehicles and cattle.

The only light came from the daylight that filtered in through cracks in the mortise work or ceiling molding.

Bryson stopped suddenly at another crack of light that seeped through the mortise work, and he peered through.

The outer end of the spokes is received into the deep mortise of the wooden fellies, and the structure appears to be complete.

She went up on tiptoe and he adjusted his head, and they meshed together splendidly, like some perfect mortise and tenon he might have fashioned to last two hundred years.

The bars of the grate were as thick as arms, set deep into mortise holes and packed with burned lime: They did not budge under his bombardment.

Near the roofs of many of the caves are mortises, projecting from which, in many instances, were found the decayed ends of wooden beams or sleepers, which were probably used, as they are now in the modern Pueblo dwellings, as poles over which to hang blankets and clothing, or to dry meat.

But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen, Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance, and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few,--not omitting even scaffolding,--or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,--in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,--and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few,--not omitting even the scaffolding,--or if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,--in such a case we feel it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck.

On the outside or in front of these singular habitations are rows of holes mortised into the face of the cliffs about the doors.

No material is used but riqimite, mortised and tenoned like wood, or set in exquisitely fitted blocks and courses.

From these clear coverts high and cool I see How every time with every time is knit, And each to all is mortised cunningly, And none is sole or whole, yet all are fit.

But I could see, by straining my sight to the uppermost, that even though those rocks had not been mortised into place by any form of binder, they seemed to stand secure.

The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of destruction it seems!