enfilade
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enfilade
- /ˌɛnfəlˈeɪd/ UK
- /ˈɛnfəlˌeɪd/ US
Rhymes with -eɪd
Where it comes from
Borrowed from French enfilade.
noun enfilades
- A line or straight passage, or the position of that which lies in a straight line. In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about people who know their world history as being able to look back through the millennia as an enfilade of rooms: Greece yields to Rome; Rome to the Byzantine Empire ... the Renaissance ... the British Empire ... America
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Gunfire directed along the length of a target.
Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I.
Opposite: defilade
- A series of doors that provide a vista when open.
Similar: flanking fire, raking fire
verb enfilades · enfilading · enfiladed
- To rake (something) with gunfire. A great quantity of artillery was placed upon the eminence, so as to batter and enfilade the left of their intrenchments.
- To be directed toward (something) like enfilading gunfire. Together they saw the market thicken, and in course of time thin away with the slow decline of the sun towards the upper end of town, its rays taking the street endways and enfilading the long thoroughfare from top to bottom.
- To arrange (rooms or other structures) in a row. […] the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses’) one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d’or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres
Similar: flank
Thesaurus
noun
Similar: flanking fire, raking fire
verb
Similar: flank
Translations
Every language
noun passage
| Deutsch | Flucht, Straßenflucht, Straßenzug, Häuserflucht, Straßenzeile, Bauflucht |
|---|
noun architecture
| Deutsch | Raumflucht, Zimmerflucht, Enfilade |
|---|
Talk about this word "enfilade." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/enfilade. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. enfilade. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/enfilade "enfilade." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/enfilade.Cite this
@misc{enfilade_2026,
title = {enfilade},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/enfilade},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
