stilt
/stɪlt
/noun
1 (usually stilts) Either of a pair of upright poles with supports for the feet enabling the user to walk at a distance above the ground.The entertainers stood out from the crowd, especially the drag queen on top of an eight foot high pair of stilts....
- ‘I can't remember when I got my very first pair of stilts, but I was very young, and I just went from there,’ she said.
- So he and his ensemble created a show featuring nine giraffes, each manned by two actors and a pair of stilts.
1.1Each of a set of posts or piles supporting a building.Traditional buildings use stilts, heat-drawing chimneys, and spatial planning to increase ventilation and heat dissipation....
- Baan Dvara Prateep is a compound of brand new wooden buildings erected on wooden stilts by the river bank.
- Like most buildings in the region, these must be raised off the ground on low piles or stilts to ward off termites and rot.
1.2A small, flat, three-pointed support for ceramic ware in a kiln.It is best to glaze lightly where the stilt will touch.
2A long-billed wading bird with predominantly black and white plumage and very long slender reddish legs.
- Family Recurvirostridae: two genera, in particular Himantopus, and several species.
- Herons, Egyptian geese, stilts and sandpipers are already frequent visitors to the site.
- I observed a pair of ringed plovers, a new species for me, a common redshank, two dozen black-winged stilts and a yellow wagtail.
Origin
Middle English: of Germanic origin; related to Dutch stelt and German Stelze. sense 2 dates from the late 18th century.