lathe

• (General American, US) enPR: lāth IPA^(key): /leɪð/

• Audio (US)

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• Rhymes: -eɪð

From Middle English lathen, from Old English laþian (“to invite, summon, call upon, ask”), from Proto-West Germanic *laþōn, from Proto-Germanic *laþōną (“to invite”), from Proto-Indo-European *lēy- (“to want, desire”). Cognate with German laden (“to invite”), Icelandic laða (“to attract”).

• laith

lathe (third-person singular simple present lathes, present participle lathing, simple past and past participle lathed)

1. (transitive, UK dialectal) To invite; bid; ask.

From Middle English *lath, leth, from Old English lǣþ (“a division of a county containing several hundreds, a district, lathe”), from Proto-West Germanic *lāþ.

• lath

lathe (plural lathes)

1. (obsolete) An administrative division of the county of Kent, in England, from the Anglo-Saxon period until it fell entirely out of use in the early twentieth century.

From Middle English lathe (“turning-lathe; stand”), from Old Norse hlað (“pile, heap”)—compare dialectal Danish lad (“stand, support frame”) (as in drejelad (“turning-lathe”), savelad (“saw bench”)), dialectal Norwegian la, lad (“pile, small wall”), dialectal Swedish lad (“folding table, lay of a loom”)—from hlaða (“to load”). More at lade.

A lathe

lathe (plural lathes)

1. (tools, metalworking, woodworking) A machine tool used to shape a piece of material, or workpiece, by rotating the workpiece against a cutting tool.

   Hypernym: machine tool

   Coordinate term: see types of machine tools

   He shaped the bedpost by turning it on a lathe.

   • 1856: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part II Chapter IV, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling

     Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be heard at the Lion d'Or.

2. (weaving) The movable swing frame of a loom, carrying the reed for separating the warp threads and beating up the weft; a lay, or batten.
3. (obsolete) A granary; a barn.
   • 2008 [1894], Walter William Skeat, Notes on The Canterbury Tales. Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 5, page 124:

     […] lathe, a barn, is still used in some parts of Yorkshire, but chiefly in local designations, being otherwise obsolescent ; see the Cleveland and Whitby glossaries. ‘The northern man writing to his neighbor may say, “My lathe standeth neer the kirkegarth,” for My barn standeth neere the churchyard’

(machine for turning and boring in metalworking or woodworking):

• engine lathe
• wheel lathe

lathe (third-person singular simple present lathes, present participle lathing, simple past and past participle lathed)

1. To shape with a lathe.
2. (computer graphics) To produce a three-dimensional model by rotating a set of points around a fixed axis.

• lath
• turner

• Leath, athel, ethal, hatel

From Old Norse hlað (“pile, heap”). More at English, Etymology 3, above.

• IPA^(key): /laːð/

lathe (plural lathes)

1. a barn to house livestock or store grain, etc.; a storehouse
   • c. 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Reeve’s Tale”, in The Canterbury Tales:

     By Goddes herte, he sal nat scape us bathe!
     Why ne had thow pit the capul in the lathe!

     By God’s heart, he will not escape us both! Why didn’t you put the horse in the barn!

• English: lathe

• “lāthe, n.(1).”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.