apron
Definitions
General English
- noun a piece of clothing worn over the front of your usual clothes to protect them when cooking
- noun a piece of ground on which planes can be parked
Aviation
- noun an area of tarmac, concrete, etc., outside a hangar for parking aircraft
Cars & Driving
- noun a panel extending downwards, typically forming a skirt along the side of the car or an air dam at the front
Construction
- A piece of finished trim placed under a window stool.
- A slab of concrete extending beyond the entrance to a building, particularly at an entrance for vehicular traffic.
- The piece of flat wood under the base of a cabinet.
- weather protection paneling on the exterior of a building.
- A splashboard at the back of a sink.
- Bowl-front closing device for a scraper bowl.
- At an airport, the pavement adjacent to hangars and appurtenant buildings.
Publishing
- noun in paper making, a strip of rubber at the end of a flow box to close the gap beneath the wire mesh
- noun an extra wide margin on a page which has a fold-out
Real Estate
- noun the projecting edge of a platform such as a theatre stage, dock or porch
Travel
- noun a piece of cloth worn over clothes to protect them when working
- noun a piece of tarmac on which planes can be parked for unloading, waiting, cleaning, etc.
Origin & History of “apron”
As in the case of adder, umpire, and many others, apron arose from a mistaken analysis of the combination ‘indefinite article + noun’. The original middle English word was napron, but as early as the 15th century a napron had turned into an apron. Napron itself had been borrowed from Old French naperon, a derivative of nape ‘cloth’ (source of English napery and napkin); and nape came from Latin mappa ‘napkin, towel’ (source of English map).
