Word.ws English Dictionary

ecranche

ecranche noun: a type of shield, used in jousting, which had an indentation or notch to hold the lance.

ecranche: a type of shield, used in jousting, which had an indentation or notch to hold the lance
Image: Helmet, front and back in the style of Konrad Poler of, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

ecranche (plural ecranches)

  1. (historical, uncommon) A type of shield, used in jousting, which had an indentation or notch to hold the lance.
    • The Ghent altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, dating to 1430, [...depicts men] who carry several different forms of ecranche. […] Ecranches, including those from the Gladiatoria group, have an indentation on the right side, the so-called bouche, which served as a means to keep the lance stable on horseback.2018, Dierk Hagedorn, Bartlomiej Walczak, Medieval Armoured Combat: The 1450 Fencing Manuscript from New Haven, Casemate Publishers, →ISBN
    • As mentioned previously, the ecranche is a small shield usually intended for use on horseback. It has a small cut out on one corner called a bouche to allow the lance to be held correctly […], Hugh Knight, The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch

Forms of ecranche

pluralecranches

Origin of ecranche

Seemingly from French, ultimately derived from cran (“notch”), although the semantics of écrancher (“uncrease, unnotch”) and its derivatives seem backward.

Questions about ecranche

What does ecranche mean?
Ecranche means a type of shield, used in jousting, which had an indentation or notch to hold the lance.
What part of speech is ecranche?
Ecranche is a noun.
What is the plural of ecranche?
The plural of ecranche is ecranches.

Words near ecranche in the dictionary

  1. ecpyrosis
  2. ECQ
  3. ecquaintance
  4. ecquaintances
  5. ECR
  6. ecranche
  7. ecranches
  8. ecranisation
  9. ecranisations
  10. ecraseur
  11. ecraseurs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ecranche (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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