facade means the face of a building, especially the front view or elevation. It carries an Arena rating of 1673, earned across 7 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, facade ranks #220 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #332 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #591 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,197 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words.
facade is pronounced /fəˈsɑ(ː)d/.
Why “facade” is a great word
The principal front of a building, or a deceptive outward appearance. From French façade, from Italian facciata ('front of a building'), from faccia ('face'), from Latin faciēs ('face, form, appearance'), first attested in English in the 1650s. Unlike “pretense,” which often refers to a specific, episodic false claim, or “front,” which can be merely the most forward part, a façade is a sustained, structural, and deliberately maintained show. It is the ornate plasterwork masking cheap brick, the gracious smile concealing contempt, or the grand portico standing before a hollow ruin—a surface so carefully composed that touching it feels like trespass, and yet every edge whispers of what it takes to keep the interior dark, and sealed.
Etymology
Borrowed from French façade, from Italian facciata, a derivation of faccia (“front”), from Latin faciēs (“face”); compare face.
noun
- The face of a building, especially the front view or elevation.e.g.“In Egypt the façades of their rock-cut tombs were[…]ornamented so simply and unobtrusively as rather to belie than to announce their internal magnificence.” — 1865, James Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All Countries:
- The face or front (most visible side) of any other thing, such as the prospect of an organ.
- A deceptive or insincere outward appearance.
- An object serving as a simplified interface to a larger body of code, as in the facade pattern.e.g.“Facades are widely used for tasks like simplifying complex APIs.” — 2017, Evan Burchard, Refactoring JavaScript: Turning Bad Code Into Good Code, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 311:
verb
- To cover or disguise an outward appearance.e.g.“Una was not happy in that small and self-immured company, already bound together by its big year on Broadway. But she façaded her unrest with a determination to improve her mind.” — 1943, Arthur Stringer, Star in a Mist, A Novel, page 180:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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