windowglass

English

Alternative forms

• window-glass
• window glass

Etymology

window +‎ glass

Noun

windowglass (countable and uncountable, plural windowglasses)

1. A windowpane; the glass comprising a windowpane; the windowpanes in a building (collectively).
   • 1852, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Dorothea”, in The Confessions of Fitz-Boodle; and Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan‎^[1], New York: Appleton, page 138:

     At first he contented himself by flattening his nose against the window-glasses of his study, and looking what the Englander was about.

   • 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson, “North-west Passage: Good Night”, in A Child’s Garden of Verses‎^[2], London: Longmans, Green & Co, page 50:

     Now we behold the embers flee
     About the firelit hearth; and see
     Our faces painted as we pass,
     Like pictures, on the window-glass.

   • 1929, Dashiell Hammett, chapter 18, in The Dain Curse‎^[3]:

     “There was no noise as of something being thrown through the glass just before the explosion: and there’s no broken window-glass inside the room. The screen was over it, too, so we can say the pineapple wasn’t chucked in through the window.”

   • 1936, William Faulkner, chapter 2, in Absalom, Absalom!‎^[4], New York: Vintage, published 1990, page 28:

     […] the house was completed save for the windowglass and the ironware which they could not make by hand […]

   • 2015, John Irving, chapter 21, in Avenue of Mysteries, New York: Simon & Schuster, published 2016, page 291:

     She stared out the window of the bus, or she slept with her forehead pressed against the window glass […]