ORIEL • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Oriel

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noun

Oriel n. (Formerly written also oriol, oryal, oryall)

A gallery for minstrels. (Obs.)

A small apartment next a hall, where certain persons were accustomed to dine; a sort of recess. (Obs.)

(Arch.) A bay window. See Bay window. "The beams that thro' the oriel shine Make prisms in every carven glass." Note: There is no generally admitted difference between a bay window and an oriel. In the United States the latter name is often applied to bay windows which are small, and either polygonal or round; also, to such as are corbeled out from the wall instead of resting on the ground.

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Etymology of 'Oriel'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Oriel" Quotes from Famous Books

... fulness of their romantic glory. They did not outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world. Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his fingers ...

— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... Beneath an oriel window facing south Through which the unniggard sun poured morning streams, I daily stood and laughing drank the beams, And, catching fistfuls, pressed ...

— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West

... dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length ...

— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... with satisfaction, when the professorship was offered. It was all so different from what was in his mind for the future. As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with years, seeing pass under his influence ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... and athletics which we force upon our youth. He once terrified a master, named Parker, by asserting that he thought cricket 'foolish.' Another time, after listening to a reprimand from the headmaster, he twitted that learned man with the asymmetry of his neckcloth. Even in Oriel he could see little charm, and was glad to leave it, at the end of his first year, for a commission in the Tenth Hussars. Crack though the regiment was—indeed, all the commissions were granted by the Regent himself—young Mr. Brummell could not bear to see all his brother-officers ...

— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

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