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Architecture vocabulary · Styles, History and Conservation

Gothic

Meaning in architecture, with examples

/ˈɡɑːθɪk/adjectiveCommon term

In architecture, Gothic means: Describing the European style of roughly the 12th to the 16th century, with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and large stained-glass windows.

In Turkish: Gotik

How it is used

Used in history courses and for cathedrals such as Notre-Dame in Paris and Chartres. Gothic structure allowed thinner walls and larger windows. Gothic Revival (or Neo-Gothic) is the 19th-century return to the style, as in London's Houses of Parliament.

Example sentences

  1. Gothic cathedrals use flying buttresses to carry the thrust of the vaults outside the walls.

  2. The university's main hall was built in the Gothic Revival style in the 1880s.

Common collocations

  • Gothic cathedral
  • Gothic Revival
  • Gothic arch
  • High Gothic
  • archA curved structure spanning an opening, built of wedge-shaped stones or bricks that press against each other and carry the load above down to the sides.
  • classical ordersThe systems of column design and proportion from ancient Greece and Rome: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, plus the Roman Tuscan and Composite orders.
  • domeA rounded roof shaped like half a sphere, built over a circular, square or polygonal space; a masonry dome spreads its weight outwards and downwards.
  • restorationWork that repairs a historic building and returns it to an earlier condition, based on careful research into its original form, materials and techniques.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Styles, History and Conservation

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