Word.ws English Dictionary

stelè

stelè is the obsolete form of stele.

Meaning of stele

Noun (1)

stele (plural steles or stelai)

  1. An upright (or formerly upright) slab containing engraved or painted decorations or inscriptions; a stela.
    • A superior class of members...had their names inscribed upon a marble stélé or column.1820, T. S. Hughes, Trav. Sicily, I x 303
  2. (uncommon) Any carved or engraved surface.
    • Two large hieroglyphed steles incised upon the face of a projecting mass of boldly rounded cliff.1877, A. B. Edwards, Thousand Miles up Nile, VI 143
  3. (obsolete) An acroterion, the decoration on the ridge of an ancient Greek building such as a temple.
    • Stele. The ornaments on the ridge of a Greek temple, answering to the antefixæ on the summit of the flank entablatures, are thus designated.c. 1840, Hosking, "Architecture" in Encyclopædia Britannica, III 470

Noun (2)

stele (plural steles)

  1. The central core of a plant's root and stem system, especially including the vascular tissue and developed from the plerome.
    • The stele may have—in different structures—one to many protoxylem (primitive wood) groups, and is accordingly described as monarch...diarch...triarch...tetrarch...polyarch.1895, Sydney Howard Vines, A Students' Text-book of Botany, section 179

Forms of stelè

pluralstelès

Questions about stelè

What is stelè the obsolete form of?
Stelè is the obsolete form of stele.

Words near stelè in the dictionary

  1. Stelton
  2. Stelzer
  3. Stelzers
  4. stelznerite
  5. stelæ
  6. stelè
  7. stelès
  8. stem
  9. stem and leaf
  10. stem borer
  11. stem borers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stelè (page history and authors); stele (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: “stelè.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stel%C3%A8. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.