gargoyle means A carved grotesque figure on a spout which conveys water away from the gutters. It carries an Arena rating of 1732, earned across 13 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, gargoyle ranks #17 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words, #137 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #176 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say, #226 of 42,762 for Qualifying.
gargoyle is pronounced /ˈɡɑːɡɔɪl/.
Why “gargoyle” is a great word
A carved grotesque figure, often in the form of a human or animal, that serves as a waterspout projecting from a gutter to throw rainwater clear of a building's wall. From the Old French gargouille ("throat, gullet"), from the Late Latin gurgulio ("throat, gullet"), first attested in French as gargoule in 1294. Unlike a grotesque, which may be a purely ornamental and silent spectator on a facade, or a chimera, a fantastical heraldic beast unbound from practical duty, the gargoyle is a working-class monster, its grimace earned by function. It is the stone throat coughing a silver arc into a storm, the hunched silhouette against a gothic spire weeping a continuous thread of rain, the demonic grin worn smooth by centuries of weather—a testament to the medieval mind’s insistence that even the mundane act of drainage deserved a mythic guardian.
Etymology
From Old French gargouille, from Latin. Doublet of gargle. The Académie Française suggests the first attestation as gargoule in 1294.
noun
- A carved grotesque figure on a spout which conveys water away from the gutters.
- Any decorative carved grotesque figure on a building.e.g.“The long-closed G.W.R. station alongside has a decidedly derelict-looking frontage, with eight gargoyles or figureheads still clinging to the portico.” — 1952 February, R. A. H. Weight, “A Railway Recorder in Wessex”, in Railway Magazine, page 131:
- A fictional winged monster.e.g.“Almost immediately one of the gargoyles swept down from the sky and attacked him. The gargoyle's momentum drove them both over the side.” — 2005, Mel Odom, The Secret Explodes, page 200:
- An ugly woman.e.g.“Above all, in what reckless moment had she encouraged that person and her gargoyle of a mother to move to Mayfair, and set up house around the corner?” — 2011, Emma Donoghue, Life Mask:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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