elevator

Pluralelevators

Formselevators, elevatoring, elevatored

1. 1
   nounAustraliaCanadaPhilippinesUScountable

   A permanent installation with a powered cab or platform that moves people and goods between the floors of a building.

   The hotel's elevator carried guests smoothly to the upper floors.

   During the fire drill, no one was allowed to use the elevators.

   Similarlift

   Note

   A dialect word as much as a machine: elevator is the usual term in the US, Canada and the Philippines, and it is current in Australia too. Australians also say lift, as New Zealanders do. The two words name the same installation, and neither is a technical variant of the other. Pick the one your readers expect and keep to it throughout a piece of writing.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A movable control surface on an aircraft that governs its pitching motion, tilting the nose up or down.

   The elevator on the tail rose to lift the aircraft's nose during takeoff.

   Pilots trim the elevators to hold level flight at cruising altitude.

   Note

   An aviation term whose name can mislead, because it does not raise the whole aircraft. It is usually hinged to the trailing edge of the horizontal stabilizer at the tail. Moving it changes the lift the tail produces, and that tips the nose up or down about the aircraft's lateral axis. In flight-control talk it is the pitch surface, and pilots speak of moving or trimming the elevator.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A tall silo for storing wheat, corn, or other grain.

   The cooperative built a new elevator beside the train tracks to handle the harvest.

   Several elevators dominate the prairie skyline, each packed with wheat.

   Similarsilo, granary

   Note

   Farm storage took its name from the lifting machinery of the general "thing that raises" sense, and in full the structure is a grain elevator. The Indianapolis Star in 1964 shows the trade's own vocabulary: grain is rushed from the fields to country elevators, then on to large terminals such as Kansas City. Outside farming contexts, say grain elevator so readers do not picture the passenger car.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A shoe fitted with an internal lift designed to make the wearer appear taller.

   The short leading man relied on an elevator to stand eye-to-eye with the heroine.

   Sales of elevators rose among men hoping to add a discreet inch or two.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   Any muscle whose function is to raise a part of the body, such as the leg or the eye.

   The surgeon identified the elevator responsible for raising the eyelid.

   Several elevators work together to lift the shoulder blade.

   Note

   In anatomy this is the English counterpart of the Latin levator that appears in formal muscle names, such as levator palpebrae superioris of the eyelid and levator scapulae of the shoulder. The word names a muscle by what it does rather than by its shape or position. Its working opposite is a depressor, which pulls the same part back down.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A dental instrument used to pry up teeth during difficult extractions, or to lift depressed pieces of bone.

   Before reaching for the forceps, the surgeon worked the elevator around the tooth's root.

   A set of fine elevators sat ready on the tray for the complicated extraction.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   Anything that raises or uplifts, whether physically or in spirit.

   The coach's halftime speech became an elevator for a discouraged squad.

   For many listeners, that song is an elevator out of gloom.

   Similarboost, lift, tonic

   Note

   The root meaning behind every other sense: elevate plus the agent suffix -or, so an elevator is simply a thing that raises. It reaches from the figurative to plain machinery. Life in 1902 toasts ale as "that elevator of spirits", while a portable conveyor lifting grain from road to rail is an elevator in the most literal way. When the lifting is of mood, the phrase usually names what is raised.

8. 8
   verbcolloquialintransitive

   To move between the floors of a building by riding in an elevator.

   Rather than climb six flights, they chose to elevator straight to the top.

   She elevatored up while her friends took the escalator.

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