height
Definitions
General English
- noun a measurement of how high something is or how tall someone is
General Science
- noun the vertical distance of a point, level or object measured from a particular place such as sea level
Construction
- The distance between two points in vertical alignment or from the top to the bottom of any object, space, or enclosure.
- The vertical distance between the average grade around a building, or the average street curb elevation, and the average level of its roof.
- The rise of an arch.
Electronics
- The vertical distance from a given level, such as the base, to another given level, such as the top.
Military
- noun vertical distance from the ground
Slang
- adjective excellent, first-rate. A term of approbation from the hip hop youth culture of the 1980s, coined by black teenagers (as a shortening of ‘height of fashion’) in the USA and spread with the music and dance trend to Britain where it enjoyed a brief vogue.
Origin & History of “height”
Etymologically as well as semantically, height is the ‘condition of being high’. It was formed in prehistoric Germanic from *khaukh- (source of high) and *-ithā, an abstract noun suffix: combined, they came down to Old English as hēhthu. The change of final -th to -t seems to have begun in the 13th century. The spelling ei reflects the word’s pronunciation in middle English times, when it rhymed approximately with modern English hate.
