frieze

• IPA^(key): /ˈfɹiːz/
• Rhymes: -iːz
• Homophones: frees, freeze

Late Middle English, from French and Middle French frise, probably from Medieval Latin Frisia (“Frisian (wool)”) due to import via Northern ships. Or, from French friser (“to curl”).[1].

frieze (countable and uncountable, plural friezes)

1. A kind of coarse woolen cloth or stuff with a shaggy or tufted (friezed) nap on one side.
   • 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796:

     This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month […]

   • 1829, Charles Sprague, To My Cigar:

     From beggar's frieze to monarch's robe,
     One common doom is pass'd;
     Sweet nature's works, the swelling globe,
     Must all burn out at last.

   • 1897, Arthur Conan Doyle, How the Governor of Saint Kitt's came Home:

     "You may shoot, or you may not," cried Scarrow, striking his hand upon the breast of his frieze jacket.

frieze (third-person singular simple present friezes, present participle friezing, simple past and past participle friezed)

1. (transitive) To make a nap on (cloth); to friz.

From French and Middle French frise f, derived from an Upper Italian fris f, Medieval Latin frisum, frisium, frigium, frixum, frigium, of controversial origin, possibly from multiple sources, Arabic إِفْرِيز‎ (ʔifrīz, “king beam, cornice”) and Latin opus Phrygium (“a kind of embroidery”, literally “work of Phrygia”), the demonym Frisian and terms related to the textile term above in a transferred sense.

frieze (plural friezes)

1. (architecture) That part of the entablature of an order which is between the architrave and cornice. It is a flat member or face, either uniform or broken by triglyphs, and often enriched with figures and other ornaments of sculpture.
2. Any sculptured or richly ornamented band in a building or, by extension, in rich pieces of furniture.
3. A banner with a series of pictures.

   The classroom had an alphabet frieze that showed an animal for each letter.

• frieze group

frieze (third-person singular simple present friezes, present participle friezing, simple past and past participle friezed)

1. (transitive, architecture) To put a frieze on.

From Old Frisian *friāsa, from Proto-West Germanic *freusan.

• IPA^(key): /ˈfriə̯zə/

frieze

1. to freeze

• “frieze”, in Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal (in Dutch), 2011