Word of the Week 2/3/19: Plinth

From Oxford Dictionaries.com:
Origin
Late 16th century: from Latin plinthus, from Greek plinthos ‘tile, brick, squared stone’.


From Merriam-Webster:
"But stay! these walls—these ivy-clad arcades—
These mouldering plinths—these sad and blackened shafts—
These vague entablatures—this crumbling frieze—
These shattered cornices—this wreck—this ruin—
These stones—alas! these gray stones—are they all—
All of the famed, and the colossal left
By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?"
In these lines from "The Coliseum," Edgar Allan Poe alludes to a practical feature of classical architecture. The plinth serves the important purpose of raising the base of the column it supports above the ground, thus protecting it from dampness and mold. The humble plinth is usually a thick block. The word's meaning was later extended to bases for statues, vases, or busts.


From Dictionary.com:
a slablike member beneath the base of a column or pier.
a square base or a lower block, as of a pedestal.
Also called plinth course . a projecting course of stones at the base of a wall; earth table.
(in joinery) a flat member at the bottom of an architrave, dado, baseboard, or the like.


From Vocabulary.com:
While it's most common for a plinth to support a pillar or column, it can also be used as a base or slab underneath a statue, a bust, or a decorative vase, and in engineering a plinth is the support for a dam.


From Wikipedia:
A pedestal or plinth is the support of a statue or a vase.

Although in Syria, Asia Minor and Tunisia the Romans occasionally raised the columns of their temples or propylaea on square pedestals, in Rome itself they were employed only to give greater importance to isolated columns, such as those of Trajan and Antoninus, or as a podium to the columns employed decoratively in the Roman triumphal arches.

The architects of the Italian revival, however, conceived the idea that no order was complete without a pedestal, and as the orders were by them employed to divide up and decorate a building in several stories, the cornice of the pedestal was carried through and formed the sills of their windows, or, in open arcades, round a court, the balustrade of the arcade. They also would seem to have considered that the height of the pedestal should correspond in its proportion with that of the column or pilaster it supported; thus in the church of Saint John Lateran, where the applied order is of considerable dimensions, the pedestal is 13 feet (4.0 m) high instead of the ordinary height of 3 to 5 feet (1.5 m).