cantilever

plural cantilevers · alternative dated cantalever · alternative dated cantaliver

1. businessA beam anchored at one end and projecting into space, such as a long bracket projecting from a wall to support a balcony.

   Eventually Sir John Fowler's and Sir Benjamin Baker's continuous steel girder bridge on the cantilever principle was adopted.

   1941 January, the late John Phillimore, “The Forth Bridge 1890-1940”, in Railway Magazine, page 5

   5 more examples

   cantilever arch cantilever arm cantilever armchair cantilever beam cantilever bracket cantilever brake cantilever bridge cantilever crane cantilever fin cantilever frame cantilever girder cantilever landing gear cantilever moment cantilever monoplane cantilever mounting cantilever roof cantilever roof bar cantilever sheet-piles cantilever single-strut landing gear cantilever span cantilever spring cantilever timbering cantilever tower crane cantilever truss cantilever-type drilling mast cantilever wall cantilever wing

   He loved Litchfield, Sharon, Williamsburg; he preferred the Georgian, and he had theories about developing a truly American style. He was called a plodder by all the Kivis, and in turn he disliked their bleak blocks of Modernist cement, their glass-fronted hen-houses, their architectural spiders with cantilever claws.

   1951, Sinclair Lewis, World So Wide, Chapter

   The underframe, which has been designed to take buffing loads of 200 tons both on the centre coupler and on the retractable side buffers, consists of two centre girders from which cantilevers project to support the solebars, which in turn carry the bodyside structure.

   1951 May, “British Railways Standard Coaches”, in Railway Magazine, page 327

   The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread.

   2004, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 10, in The Line of Beauty […], London: Picador, →ISBN

   The plank along which pirates made their victims walk was a cantilever. So is a diving board. As you walk along the plank, the unsupported ends dips ^([sic]). It's possible to arrange for two cantilevers to be connected at their unsupported ends, which would let you seamlessly cross from one cantilever to the other while also distributing your weight across both fixed ends.

   2023 May 3, Philip Haigh, “The art and science of building bridges”, in RAIL, number 982, page 40

   1. businessA beam anchored at one end and used as a lever within a microelectromechanical system.

      cantilever circuit

      1 more example

      Magnetic resonance force microscopy employs an ultrasmall cantilever arm as a platform for specimens that are then moved in and out of proximity to a tiny magnet.

      2009 January 13, John Markoff, “A Breakthrough in Imaging: Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 06 Sep 2019

2. figure skatingA technique, similar to the spread eagle, in which the skater travels along a deep edge with knees bent and bends their back backwards, parallel to the ice.

present singular third person cantilevers · participle present cantilevering · participle past cantilevered · past cantilevered · alternative dated cantalever · alternative dated cantaliver

1. To project (something) in the manner of or by means of a cantilever.

   Just above, the museums top floor seems to shift slightly, its corners cantilevering over the edge of the story below as if it is sliding off the top of the building.

   2007 October 28, Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Where Gods Yearn for Long-Lost Treasures”, in New York Times