mouchette

[ moo-shet ]

noun

, Architecture.

1. a daggerlike form, especially in tracery, created by a segmental and an ogee curve so that it is pointed at one end and circular at the other.

Word History and Origins

Origin of mouchette¹

1925–30; < French: originally, the fillet below an ovolo, projecting part of a cornice; hence, with the common sense “what protrudes,” probably derivative of moucher to cut or knock off (something protruding) ( -ette ), apparently extended sense of moucher to wipe (a person's) nose < Vulgar Latin *muccāre, derivative of Latin muccus, mūcus mucus

Example Sentences

Even if it's very stern, even if it's “Mouchette” by Bresson, it is sexy.

From Los Angeles Times

Even if it's very stern, even if it's “Mouchette” by Bresson, it is sexy.

From Los Angeles Times

An anonymous woman in Amsterdam, eventually identified as Martine Neddam, built a brightly colored site that purported to be the home page of a 13-year-old named Mouchette, after the girl in the 1967 Robert Bresson film who finds a life of torment and abuse too much to bear.

From New York Times

She could be the heroine of one of Robert Bresson’s French epics of minimalist misery — his Joan of Arc or Mouchette — and that makes her close to ideal as the too-tough-to-cry Katniss.

From Time

In Mouchette, the beautifully pitiless story of a teenage outcast so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself, the girl's schoolmates sing one refrain as if it were a prayer: "Hope--for more hope."

From Time Magazine Archive