sconce

• (UK) IPA^(key): /skɒns/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

A modern style of sconce.

An older style of sconce.

From Middle English sconce, skonce, sconse, from Old French esconce (“lantern”), from Latin absconsus (“hidden”), perfect passive participle of abscondō (“hide”).[1][2] Cognate with abscond.

sconce (plural sconces)

1. A light fixture.
   • Evelyn

     tapers put into lanterns or sconces of several-coloured, oiled paper, that the wind might not annoy them

   • Dryden

     Golden sconces hang not on the walls.

2. A head or a skull.
   • Shakespeare

     to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel

3. A poll tax; a mulct or fine.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Johnson to this entry?)

4. A piece of armour for the head; headpiece; helmet.
   • Shakespeare

     I must get a sconce for my head.

• abscond

sconce (third-person singular simple present sconces, present participle sconcing, simple past and past participle sconced)

1. (obsolete) to impose a fine, a forfeit, or a mulct.

Borrowed from Middle Dutch schans, cognate with German Schanze.[2]

• skonce

sconce (plural sconces)

1. A type of small fort or other fortification, especially as built to defend a pass or ford.
   • Milton

     No sconce or fortress of his raising was ever known either to have been forced, or yielded up, or quitted.

2. (obsolete) A hut for protection and shelter; a stall.
   • Beaumont and Fletcher

     one that […] must raise a sconce by the highway and sell switches

3. The circular tube, with a brim, in a candlestick, into which the candle is inserted.
4. (architecture) A squinch.
5. A fragment of a floe of ice.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Kane to this entry?)

6. A fixed seat or shelf.

• ensconce

sconce (third-person singular simple present sconces, present participle sconcing, simple past and past participle sconced)

1. (obsolete) to shut within a sconce; to imprison.

• sconce in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• sconce in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
• “sconce” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2019.