different between curtain vs cloud

English

Etymology

From Middle English curteyn, corteyn, cortyn, cortine, from Old French cortine, from Medieval Latin c?rt?na (“curtain”), from Latin cohors (“court, enclosure”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?k??tn?/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /?k?tn?/, [?k??n?]
• Rhymes: -??(r)t?n
• Homophone: Kirton

Noun

curtain (plural curtains)

1. A piece of cloth covering a window, bed, etc. to offer privacy and keep out light.

   • Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire.

2. A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.
3. (theater, by extension) The beginning of a show; the moment the curtain rises.

   He took so long to shave his head that we arrived 45 minutes after curtain and were denied late entry.

4. (fortifications) The flat area of wall which connects two bastions or towers; the main area of a fortified wall.
   • , Folio Society, 2006, vol.1, p.220:

     Captain Rense, beleagring the Citie of Errona for us, […] caused a forcible mine to be wrought under a great curtine of the walles […].

5. (euphemistic, also "final curtain", sometimes in the plural) Death.
   • 1979, Monty Python, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

     For life is quite absurd / And death's the final word / You must always face the curtain with a bow.

6. (architecture) That part of a wall of a building which is between two pavilions, towers, etc.
7. (obsolete, derogatory) A flag; an ensign.

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

curtain (third-person singular simple present curtains, present participle curtaining, simple past and past participle curtained)

1. To cover (a window) with a curtain; to hang curtains.
   • 1985, Carol Shields, "Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls" in The Collected Stories, Random House Canada, 2004, p. 163,

     The window, softly curtained with dotted swiss, became the focus of my desperate hour-by-hour attention.

2. (figuratively) To hide, cover or separate as if by a curtain.
   • c. 1593, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 2, [2]

     And, after conflict such as was supposed / The wandering prince and Dido once enjoy'd, / When with a happy storm they were surprised / And curtain'd with a counsel-keeping cave, / We may, each wreathed in the other's arms, / Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber;

   • 1840, Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" [3]

     But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.

   • 1958, Ovid, The Metamorphoses, translated by Horace Gregory, New York: Viking, Book IV, Perseus, p. 115,

     He saw a rock that pierced the shifting waters / As they stilled, now curtained by the riding / Of the waves, and leaped to safety on it.

   • 2003, A. B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride (2001), translated by Hillel Halkin, Harcourt, Part 2, Chapter 17, p. 115,

     But bleakness still curtained the gray horizon.

Synonyms

• becurtain

Translations

See also

• blind
• drape
• curtain on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• turacin

English

Etymology

From Middle English cloud, cloude, clod, clud, clude, from Old English cl?d (“mass of stone, rock, boulder, hill”), from Proto-Germanic *kl?taz, *klutaz (“lump, mass, conglomeration”), from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to ball up, clench”).

Cognate with Scots clood, clud (“cloud”), Dutch kluit (“lump, mass, clod”), German Low German Kluut, Kluute (“lump, mass, ball”), German Kloß (“lump, ball, dumpling”), Danish klode (“sphere, orb, planet”), Swedish klot (“sphere, orb, ball, globe”), Icelandic klót (“knob on a sword's hilt”). Related to English clod, clot, clump, club. Largely displaced native Middle English wolken, wolkne from Old English wolcen (whence Modern English welkin), the commonest Germanic word (compare Dutch wolk, German Wolke).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) enPR: kloud, IPA^(key): /kla?d/
• Rhymes: -a?d

Noun

cloud (plural clouds)

1. (obsolete) A rock; boulder; a hill.
2. A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air.

   • So this was my future home, I thought! […] Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.

3. Any mass of dust, steam or smoke resembling such a mass.
4. Anything which makes things foggy or gloomy.
5. (figuratively) Anything unsubstantial.
6. A dark spot on a lighter material or background.
7. A group or swarm, especially suspended above the ground or flying.

   • so great a cloud of witnesses
8. An elliptical shape or symbol whose outline is a series of semicircles, supposed to resemble a cloud.

9. (computing, with "the") The Internet, regarded as an abstract amorphous omnipresent space for processing and storage, the focus of cloud computing.
10. (figuratively) A negative or foreboding aspect of something positive: see every cloud has a silver lining or every silver lining has a cloud.
11. (slang) Crystal methamphetamine.
12. A large, loosely-knitted headscarf worn by women.

Quotations

• For quotations using this term, see Citations:cloud.

Hyponyms

• See also Thesaurus:cloud

Derived terms

Translations

See cloud/translations § Noun.

See also

• Appendix:English collective nouns

Verb

cloud (third-person singular simple present clouds, present participle clouding, simple past and past participle clouded)

1. (intransitive) To become foggy or gloomy, or obscured from sight.

2. (transitive) To overspread or hide with a cloud or clouds.

3. (transitive) To make obscure.

4. (transitive) To make less acute or perceptive.

5. (transitive) To make gloomy or sullen.
6. (transitive) To blacken; to sully; to stain; to tarnish (reputation or character).
7. (transitive) To mark with, or darken in, veins or sports; to variegate with colors.
8. (intransitive) To become marked, darkened or variegated in this way.

Translations

Further reading

• cloud on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• clouds on Wikimedia Commons.Wikimedia Commons

Anagrams

• could, culdo-

French

Pronunciation

Noun

cloud m (uncountable)

1. (computing, Anglicism, with le) the cloud.

Synonyms

• le nuage

See also

• informatique en nuage
• infonuagique

Middle English

Alternative forms

• clowd, cloude, clowde, clud, clude

Etymology

From Old English cl?d, from Proto-West Germanic *kl?t, from Proto-Germanic *kl?taz.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /klu?d/

Noun

cloud (plural cloudes)

1. A small elevation; a hill.
2. A clod, lump, or boulder.
3. A cloud (mass of water vapour) or similar.
4. The sky (that which is above the ground).
5. That which obscures, dims, or clouds.

Related terms

• cloudy

Descendants

• English: cloud
• Scots: clud, clood

References

• “cl?ud, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

Old Irish

Etymology

From clo- +? -ud.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?kl?o.uð/

Noun

cloüd m (genitive cloita)

1. verbal noun of cloïd: subduing
   • c. 800–825, Diarmait, Milan Glosses on the Psalms, published in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (reprinted 1987, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), edited and with translations by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. I, pp. 7–483, Ml. 56^b16

Descendants

• Middle Irish: clód
  • Irish: cló
  • Scottish Gaelic: clòthadh

Inflection

Mutation

Further reading

• Gregory Toner, Maire Ní Mhaonaigh, Sharon Arbuthnot, Dagmar Wodtko, Maire-Luise Theuerkauf, editors (2019) , “clód”, in eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language

Spanish

Noun

cloud m (plural clouds)

1. (computing) cloud