bend sinister
bend sinister noun: a diagonal band on a coat of arms going from the sinister chief (the viewer's top right) to the dexter base, sometimes erroneously held to indicate bastardy.
Noun
bend sinister (plural bends sinister)
- A diagonal band on a coat of arms going from the sinister chief (the viewer's top right) to the dexter base, sometimes erroneously held to indicate bastardy.
- Bastardy, (by extension) a defect or stigma.
- A ‘bend sinister’ ran athwart his reputation as a priest. Men muttered that he was an infidel, a blasphemous vagabond, versed in all the damnable heresies of antiquity.1904, Warwick Deeping, Love Among the Ruins, page 101
- Rumour credited his family tree with both a 50 per cent. Jewish strain and a bend sinister.1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 105
Forms of bend sinister
| plural | bends sinister |
|---|
Words formed from bend sinister
Questions about bend sinister
- What does bend sinister mean?
- Bend sinister means a diagonal band on a coat of arms going from the sinister chief (the viewer's top right) to the dexter base, sometimes erroneously held to indicate bastardy.
- What part of speech is bend sinister?
- Bend sinister is a noun.
- What is the plural of bend sinister?
- The plural of bend sinister is bends sinister.
Words near bend sinister in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bend sinister (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “bend sinister.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bend_sinister. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.