Word.ws English Dictionary

rotunda

Syllables: ro·tun·da/ɹə(ʊ)ˈtʌndə/US/ɹoʊˈtʌndə/

rotunda noun: a round building, usually small, often with a dome. Also the alternative spelling of rotonda.

rotunda: a round building, usually small, often with a dome
Image: Marcin Konsek, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

rotunda (plural rotundas or rotundae)

  1. A round building, usually small, often with a dome.
    • The rotunda begun but never completed by Abbot Wulfric (1047–59) at St Augustine’s Abbey as a link between the church of St Mary and that of St Peter and St Paul is an unusual and ambitious example of mid-eleventh-century English architecture which partly survives (fig. 4.6, top). […] Many of these...1976, Bridget Cherry, “Ecclesiastical architecture”, in David M[ackenzie] Wilson, editor, The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, London: Methuen & Co Ltd, →ISBN, pages 188–189
    • The purely Greek character of the temple is revealed in the fact that there is no portico aligning the structure; Roman tholoi and rotundae are usually distinguished by a portico.1998, “Antiquity”, in Bruce Almberg, Charles Earle, Michael Robinson, Katja Steiner, transl., edited by Stefan Grundmann, The Architecture of Rome: An Architectural History in 400 Individual...
  2. (frequently capitalized) A Gothic typeface used in early printed books in Northern Italy, based on a rounded script developed in the 13th cent.; the manuscript hand on which this typeface was based.
  3. A form of cupola that has pentagons rather than squares or rectangles.

Proper noun capitalized: Rotunda

Rotunda

  1. The United States Capitol rotunda.
    • No African-Americans have lain in state in the Rotunda, and only two have lain there in honor: Mrs. Parks in 2005 and Officer Jacob Joseph Chestnut, a Capitol Police officer killed in the line of duty, in 1998.2019 October 19, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Cummings to Lie in State in the Capitol”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Also used as

rotunda is also the alternative spelling of rotonda.

Forms of rotunda

pluralrotundas
pluralrotundae
alternative formRotunda

Origin of rotunda

Learned borrowing from Latin rotunda, from rotundus (“round”). In the architectural sense, from Sancta Maria Rotunda (the name for a church in the Pantheon).

Words formed from rotunda

Questions about rotunda

What does rotunda mean?
Rotunda means a round building, usually small, often with a dome.
What part of speech is rotunda?
Rotunda can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce rotunda?
Rotunda is pronounced /ɹə(ʊ)ˈtʌndə/ (UK).
What is the plural of rotunda?
The plural of rotunda is rotundas.

Words near rotunda in the dictionary

  1. rotulus
  2. Rotuma
  3. Rotuman
  4. Rotumans
  5. rotund
  6. rotunda
  7. rotundae
  8. rotundas
  9. rotundate
  10. rotundation
  11. rotunded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rotunda (page history and authors); Rotunda (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-rotunda.wav.

Cite this entry: “rotunda.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rotunda. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.