anvil
/ˈanvɪl
/noun
1A heavy iron block with a flat top and concave sides, on which metal can be hammered and shaped.Thousands of stone hammers, anvils, crucibles, metal objects, and pieces of ancient metallurgical debris were also recovered....
- All you need is a plenishing hammer, the anvil, a few metal punches, files, tin-snips for cutting sheets of silver up to make rings and that's it.
- Their first few tools consisted of an engine block which was used as an anvil and some self-made hammers.
2The horizontally extended upper part of a cumulonimbus cloud: [as modifier]: anvil clouds...
- The top of a cumulonimbus cloud is often capped by cirrus, which is why the anvil of a thundercloud is often brilliant white.
- Composed mostly of ice, an anvil cloud gets its shape from the rising air in the thunderstorm that expands and spreads out as the air bumps up against the bottom of the stratosphere.
- A thundercloud, with a distinctive upper anvil shape, results from air which is moist and unstable rising by convection.
3 Anatomy another term for incus.Three small bones (the hammer, anvil, and stirrup bones) vibrate with the sound, passing the vibrations to the inner ear....
- The findings are drawn from examination of the hammer, anvil and stirrup bones in the ears of Homo heidelbergensis fossils, also known as Boxgrove Man.
- There they became the anvil and the hammer, minute bones that transmit sound from the eardrum to the stirrup bone and, ultimately, to the inner ear.
Origin
Old English anfilte, from the Germanic base of on + a verbal stem meaning 'beat'.
An anvil is something to strike on. In Old English the spelling was anfilte, from the Germanic base of on and a verb meaning ‘beat’.