curtain

noun

1. A piece of cloth covering a window, bed, etc. to offer privacy and keep out light.

   “He drew the curtains at 11:00pm before falling asleep.”

   “Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire.”

   “It is realised that the old Pullman standard sleeper, with its convertible "sections", each containing upper and lower berths, and with no greater privacy at night than the curtains drawn along both sides of a middle aisle, has had its day.”

2. A similar piece of cloth that separates the audience and the stage in a theater.

   ““H'm !” he said, “so, so—it is a tragedy in a prologue and three acts. I am going down this afternoon to see the curtain fall for the third time on what[…]will prove a good burlesque ; but it all began dramatically enough. It was last Saturday[…]that two boys, playing in the little spinney just outside Wembley Park Station, came across three large parcels done up in American cloth.[…]””

3. (broadly)The beginning of a show; the moment the curtain rises.

   “He took so long to shave his head that we arrived 45 minutes after curtain and were denied late entry.”

4. The flat area of wall which connects two bastions or towers; the main area of a fortified wall.

   “Captain Rense, beleagring the Citie of Errona for us, […] caused a forcible mine to be wrought under a great curtine of the walles […].”

5. (euphemistic, in-plural, sometimes)Death, final curtain.

   “For life is quite absurd / And death's the final word / You must always face the curtain with a bow.”

6. That part of a wall of a building which is between two pavilions, towers, etc.
7. (derogatory, obsolete)A flag; an ensign.

   “Their ragged curtains poorly are let loose”

8. The uninterrupted stream of fluid that falls onto a moving substrate in the process of curtain coating.

verb

1. (transitive)To cover (a window) with a curtain; to hang curtains.

   “In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs. Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking vinous bliss; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott, and frequenters of this retreat.”

   “The window, softly curtained with dotted swiss, became the focus of my desperate hour-by-hour attention.”

2. (figuratively, transitive)To hide, cover or separate as if by a curtain.

   “And, after conflict such as was supposed / The wandering prince and Dido once enjoy'd, / When with a happy storm they were surprised / And curtain'd with a counsel-keeping cave, / We may, each wreathed in the other's arms, / Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber;”

   “But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.”

   “He saw a rock that pierced the shifting waters / As they stilled, now curtained by the riding / Of the waves, and leaped to safety on it.”

   “But bleakness still curtained the gray horizon.”