Crossword clues for quoin
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Quoin \Quoin\ (kwoin or koin; 277), n. [See Coin, and cf. Coigne.]
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(Arch.) Originally, a solid exterior angle, as of a building; now, commonly, one of the selected pieces of material by which the corner is marked.
Note: In stone, the quoins consist of blocks larger than those used in the rest of the building, and cut to dimension. In brickwork, quoins consist of groups or masses of brick laid together, and in a certain imitation of quoins of stone.
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A wedgelike piece of stone, wood, metal, or other material, used for various purposes; as:
(Masonry) To support and steady a stone.
(Gun.) To support the breech of a cannon.
(Print.) To wedge or lock up a form within a chase.
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(Naut.) To prevent casks from rolling.
Hollow quoin. See under Hollow.
Quoin post (Canals), the post of a lock gate which abuts against the wall.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1530s, "a cornerstone," variant spelling of coin (n.); in early use also in other senses of that word, including "a wedge."
Wiktionary
n. 1 Any of the corner building blocks of a building, usually larger or more ornate than the surrounding blocks. 2 The keystone of an arch. 3 A metal wedge which fits into the space between the type and the edge of a chase, and is tightened to fix the metal type in place. 4 (context obsolete nautical English) A form of wedge used to prevent casks from moving
WordNet
Gazetteer
Wikipedia
Quoin or Du Quoin may refer to:
Quoins ( or ) are masonry blocks at the corner of a wall. They exist in some cases to provide actual strength for a wall made with inferior stone or rubble and in other cases to make a feature of a corner, creating an impression of permanence and strength, and reinforcing the onlooker’s sense of a structure’s presence.
Stone quoins are used on stone or brick buildings. Brick quoins may appear on brick buildings that extrude from the facing brickwork in such a way as to give the appearance of uniformly cut blocks of stone larger than the bricks. Where quoins are used for decoration and not for load-bearing, they may be made from a wider variety of materials beyond brick, stone or concrete, extending to timber, cement render or other stucco.
A quoin is a device used to lock printing type in a chase. Quoins are pairs of wedges, facing opposite directions. A wrench or quoin key forces them together.
Usage examples of "quoin".
The exactness of the coiled muzzle-lashing, made fast to the eye-bolt above the port-lid, the seizing of the mid-breeching to the pommelion, the neat arrangement of the sponge, handspike, powderhorn, priming-wire, bed, quoin, train-tackle, shot and all the rest told a knowing eye a great deal about the gun-crew and even more about the midshipman of the sub-division.
Petersburg henceforth shall, before it is accepted, be quoined in the same manner by Solomon Kohan.
Settling a hand on the ornamentation, he deduced that it was not real stone but Coade stone, an artificial material that was used for quoining and sculpture when using real stone was too expensive.
The gunners, who had been hammering quoins into the shaken howitzer beds, leaped back as the portfires were lit and as the barrels thudded down again.
He had returned the bag of rupees to Major Stokes, and now, obscurely, he wanted some punishment from the Major, but Stokes was far more concerned about the angle of the quoin.
In a part of the world where so many places have harsh, foreignsounding names full of hard consonants-De Kalb, Du Quoin, Keokuk, Kankakee-Springfield is a little piece of poetry, a name suggesting grassy meadows and cool waters.
The French gunners abandoned their pieces, left their horses squealing and dying, and fled, and then the British guns racked their elevating screws or loosened the howitzer quoins and started to pour shot and shell into the massed ranks of the nearest French column.
One of them, the gun captain, snapped at Sharpe to fetch some quoins so that the breech of the carronade could be elevated.
Handspike, crow, ram, bed, quoin, train tackle, round shot, canister and grape were all neatly arranged.