A word used by both masons and carpenters to describe work done on newly-cut stone or timber so as to reduce the faces of the material to a plane surface.
The two contexts in which this word has been noted suggest that it may have referred to scaffold poles, and that the ‘bridges’ were the platform for the workmen.
The making of scissors and shears were ancient crafts in Yorkshire, especially in Sheffield. The scissorsmiths saw themselves as distinct from shearsmiths and claimed the right to manufacture any item which operated on the pin principle, even some that were named ‘shears’.
A word applied to various implements used for ladling liquids, or shovelling sand, grit and the like. Often the context does not make the exact meaning clear.
A term for one of the processes by which wool is converted into yarn, originally using hand cards but later a machine which had rollers covered with card wires.
This early word for ‘coal’ has been explained in a variety of ways but one important theory is that it first described coal which had been cast ashore from seams exposed on the sea bed.
In Wright the ‘sign-tree’ or ‘sine-tree’ is explained firstly as ‘one of the principal timbers of a roof’, and secondly as the ‘centerings of an arch’ (EDD).