terrace
/ˈtɛrəs/noun, verb
Raised level platform or area; to form into steps
From Latin terra (earth).
Lineage
The story
Picture a medieval gardener piling earth into a flat shelf on a hillside, then covering its raw face with turf so people could walk—or admire the view—without sliding downhill. That practical earthen platform was the ancestor of the Old French terrasse, borrowed into English in the 1510s for a raised, level construction. Its Latin core, terra, could mean not only soil but land, the earthly realm, and eventually our planet among the stars; English kept mining it for words such as terrain and terrestrial. By the 1670s, geologists were using terrace for a naturally occurring flat step in a landscape, while builders later used it for rows of houses along a slope. In Britain, terraces also became standing areas in soccer stadiums, a modern echo of the word’s oldest image: people gathered on a raised shelf of earth.
Modern usage
A standing-room-only section of a soccer stadium
- Heard in
- soccer · stadium culture · British usage
- See
- Urban Dictionary entry describing soccer-stadium terraces
Words from the same roots
terra · Latin, ‘earth, land’
Derivedterrain, terrestrial, terrene, terrigenous, terrarium, subterranean