stiffener
stiffener noun: anything added to something in order to stiffen it, such as a support beam, or starch for a collar.
Noun
stiffener (plural stiffeners)
- Anything added to something in order to stiffen it, such as a support beam, or starch for a collar.
- […] he wears a wisp of black silk round his neck, without any stiffener, as an apology for a neckerchief […]1856, Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life & Every-day People
- […] each of these stiffener-columns must be designed to resist approximately 26 tons. Sometimes single angles are thus used as stiffeners […]1901, James Nisbit Hazlehurst, Towers and Tanks for Water-works: The Theory and Practice of Their Design and Construction
- One of a series of angle bars, Z-bars, beams, rods, or other shapes, attached in order to provide them the necessary stiffness or rigidity.
- An alcoholic drink taken to fortify oneself.
- I believe the old man has taken himself off to the nearest bar for a stiffener.2017, William Meikle, Sigils and Totems
Examples of stiffener in a sentence
- The tee bar (b) is used as a stiffener to important bulkheads […]1904, Edward L. Attwood, War-ships: A Text-book on the Construction, Protection, Stability, Turning, Etc., of War Vessels:
- […] with this arrangement the cylinders are cast separately from the saddle, and bolted to the frames on each side with a fabricated stiffener between the frames.1944 November and December, “Modified G.W.R. "Hall" Class Locomotives”, in Railway Magazine, page 350:
Forms of stiffener
| plural | stiffeners |
|---|
Origin of stiffener
From stiffen + -er.
Words formed from stiffener
Questions about stiffener
- What does stiffener mean?
- Stiffener means anything added to something in order to stiffen it, such as a support beam, or starch for a collar.
- How do you use stiffener in a sentence?
- The tee bar (b) is used as a stiffener to important bulkheads […]
- What part of speech is stiffener?
- Stiffener is a noun.
- What is the plural of stiffener?
- The plural of stiffener is stiffeners.
Words near stiffener in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stiffener (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)-Flame, not lame-stiffener.wav.
Cite this entry: “stiffener.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stiffener. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.