half-timbered

See also: halftimbered

English

WOTD – 4 October 2020

Etymology

Half-timbered houses in the village of Le Bec-Hellouin in Eure, Normandy, France.

From half- (prefix meaning ‘half, partial; not complete’) +‎ timbered.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌhɑːf ˈtɪmbəd/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌhæf ˈtɪmbɚd/
• Hyphenation: half-tim‧bered

Adjective

half-timbered (not comparable)

1. (architecture) Of a building: constructed using a load-bearing timber frame with the spaces (panels) between the timbers filled with bricks, stone, or wattle and daub, etc. (the infill), especially if the timber frame is visible on the outside of the building.

   Synonym: half-timber

   • 1800, J[ohn] Evans, “Letter II”, in A Tour through Part of North Wales, in the Year 1798, and at Other Times; […], London: […] J. White, […], →OCLC, page 26:

     Having ideally supposed that the County Town must be superior to all others in point of beauty and extent, we were disappointed to find it a small place, consisting of about a hundred half-timbered houses forming a miserable street.

   • 1820, James Loch, An Account of the Improvements on the Estates of the Marquess of Stafford, in the Counties of Stafford and Salop, and on the Estate of Sutherland. […], London: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […], footnote *, page 87:

     The construction here described, is exactly similar to that followed in the old half timbered houses of England.

   • 1837, Thomas Moule, “The West Riding”, in The English Counties Delineated; or, A Topographical Description of England. […], volume II, London: George Virtue, […], →OCLC, page 469, column 2:

     Some of the streets are very narrow, with old half timbered houses on each side; Crown-street is a specimen of the early style of its street architecture.

   • 1860, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], “An Item Added to the Family Register”, in The Mill on the Floss […], volume II, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book III (The Downfall), pages 135–136:

     The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it down and built the new one.

   • 1901, J[ohn] Alfred Gotch, “Miscellaneous Work— […]”, in Early Renaissance Architecture in England: A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500–1625 […], London: B. T. Batsford, […], →OCLC, page 203:

     The old houses, however, were left until the great fire of 1666 swept them away: it was these charming half-timbered dwellings which afforded the chief fuel for that huge bonfire.

   • 1980, Gerald H. Clarfield, “For Loyalist to Whig”, in Timothy Pickering and the American Republic, Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, →ISBN, page 3:

     Modeled upon a style popular in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, the many-gabled, half-timbered house still stands, testimony to the skill of its builder.

   • 2005, David Hilliam, “Shakespeare in the Twenty-first Century”, in William Shakespeare: England’s Greatest Playwright and Poet (Rulers, Scholars, and Artists of the Renaissance), New York, N.Y.: Rosen Publishing, →ISBN, page 92:

     This half-timbered building is the birthplace of William Shakespeare. In this house, he and his brothers and sisters were born and raised.

   • 2014, Colin Rees, Derek Thomas, “4th April: Elgar”, in Birth of a Feather: Seasonal Changes on both Sides of the Atlantic, Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire: Matador, →ISBN, page 97:

     We pass Much and Little Marcle, and Dymock, all ancient sounding and through the waking up heart of the half-timbered market town of Ledbury, dating to the Doomsday Book.

Alternative forms

• halftimbered

Translations

constructed using a load-bearing timber frame with the spaces between the timbers filled with bricks, etc.

• Danish: bindingsværk (da)s-
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: bindingsverks-, i bindingsverk

  Nynorsk: bindingsverks-, i bindingsverk

• Spanish: con entramado de madera
• Swedish: korsvirkes-

Further reading

• timber framing on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “half-timbered, adj.” under “half-timber, n. and adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898.
• “half-timbered, adj.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.