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pedestal

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈpɛdɪstəl//
  • //ˈpɛdɪsˌtuːl//

The base or foot of a column, statue, vase, lamp.

noun

  1. 1

    The base or foot of a column, statue, vase, lamp.

    The table and two base pedestals cost more than $4,000. The pedestals are described as having “hand applied ebonized inlay with bell flowers topped by hand carved scrolls and a fluted column.”

    The state reached a deal with the city to remove the 40-foot granite pedestal the Lee statue sat on for more than a century.

  2. 2

    figurativeA place of reverence or honor.

    He has put his mother on a pedestal. You can't say a word against her.

    It’s an old, old story. We’ve all placed people on pedestals, and then, almost inevitably, they let us down. They violate our trust. They betray us. They fall off the pedestal, or we remove them.

    But India is also where the Mahatma may have fallen furthest from the pedestal.

  3. 3

    A casting secured to the frame of a truck of a railcar and forming a jaw for holding a journal box.

  4. 4

    A pillow block; a low housing.

  5. 5

    An iron socket, or support, for the foot of a brace at the end of a truss where it rests on a pier.

  6. 6

    a pedestal coil, group of connected straight pipes arranged side by side and one above another, used in a radiator.

  7. 7

    A ground-level housing for a passive connection point for underground cables.

  8. 8

    The measured value when no input signal is given.

  9. 9

    The central part of the cockpit, between the pilots, where various controls are located.

  10. 10

    An item upon which television cameras are mounted.

  11. 11

    The tough protuberant pad covering a dromedary's sternum, which, when the camel lies down, causes the abdomen to be slightly above the hot ground.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French piédestal, itself borrowed from Italian piedistallo (literally “foot stand”). Spelling influenced by Latin pēs, pedem.

verb

  1. 1

    To set or support on (or as if on) a pedestal.

Forms

plural
pedestals
past tense
pedestaled, pedestalled
past participle
pedestaled, pedestalled
present participle
pedestaling, pedestalling
third person singular
pedestals
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).