gambrel

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

noun a gable roof with two slopes on each side and the lower slope being steeper

Uncertain, perhaps from Old Northern French gamberel, from gambe (“leg”).

In said cyclone, said young man was severely caressed by the elements, and tipped over in such a way as to shatter the right leg, just below the gambrel joint. — Remarks, Bill Nye
Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born. — The Dunwich horror, H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of Italian tables d'hote, clerks, social-workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground; lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. — The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life, Sinclair Lewis

gambrel roof

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