terrace. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

terrace

SYLLABICATION:	ter·race
PRONUNCIATION:	trs
NOUN:	1a. A porch or walkway bordered by colonnades. b. A platform extending outdoors from a floor of a house or apartment building. 2. An open, often paved area adjacent to a house serving as an outdoor living space; a patio. 3. A raised bank of earth having vertical or sloping sides and a flat top: turning a hillside into a series of ascending terraces for farming. 4. A flat, narrow stretch of ground, often having a steep slope facing a river, lake, or sea. 5a. A row of buildings erected on raised ground or on a sloping site. b. A section of row houses. c. abbr. Ter. or Terr. A residential street, especially on a slope or hill. 6. A narrow strip of landscaped earth in the middle of a street. 7. Chiefly Upper Northern & Midwestern U.S. See parking (sense 3). See Regional Note at parking.
TRANSITIVE VERB:	Inflected forms: ter·raced, ter·rac·ing, ter·rac·es 1. To provide (a house, for example) with a terrace or terraces. 2. To form (a hillside or sloping lawn, for example) into terraces.
ETYMOLOGY:	French, from Old French, from Old Provençal terrassa, from Vulgar Latin ^*terrcea, feminine of terrceus, earthen, from Latin terra, earth. See ters-* in Appendix I.


The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.