frontage

frontage

English

Etymology

front +‎ -age

Noun

frontage (countable and uncountable, plural frontages)

1. The front part of a property or building that faces the street.
   • 1885, William Dean Howells, chapter III, in The Rise of Silas Lapham‎:

     Put your little reception-room here beside the door, and get the whole width of your house frontage for a square hall, and an easy low-tread staircase running up the sides of it.

   • 1981, Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood, New York: Vintage, 1983, Chapter I, p. 5,

     BishopsCourt appeared sometimes to want to rival the Canon's house. It looked a house-boat despite its guard of whitewashed stones and luxuriant flowers, its wooden fretwork frontage almost wholly immersed in bougainvillaea.

2. The land between a property and the street.
3. The length of a property along a street.
4. Property or territory adjacent to a body of water.
   • 1939, Time, 12 June, 1939,

     And here he brought up the entire subject of geopolitics in the Baltic, a sea which Germany in wartime must control to be able to assure herself of shipments of Swedish iron ore needed for her war factories, a sea on which Soviet Russia has a frontage of only 75 miles […]

   • 2016, The Chronicle Herald, 25 May, 2016,

     It is important to keep municipally owned land, especially lake frontage, in the hands of the municipality.

5. The front part generally.
   • 1918, Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.; Bartleby.com, 1999,

     […] to the eyes of his mother and his aunt, who occupied wicker chairs at a little distance, he was almost indistinguishable except for the stiff white shield of his evening frontage.

   • 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co., Chapter 18,

     War looks but to the frontage, the appearance.

   • 2008, Lynn Veach Sadler, Not Dreamt of in Your Philosophy, page 134:

     I'd go running in, pretend-breathless, nuzzle her neck, reach around to cup her frontage.

Coordinate terms

• facade

Derived terms

• frontage road

Translations

the front part of a property

Bulgarian: фасада (bg) f (fasada), лицева страна f (liceva strana) Czech: průčelí (cs) n Esperanto: fronto (eo) Finnish: julkisivu (fi) Italian: facciata (it) Russian: фаса́д (ru) (fasád)