Definition of "hinge" in English

noun

1. A jointed or flexible device that allows the pivoting of a door etc.

2. A naturally occurring joint resembling such hardware in form or action, as in the shell of a bivalve.

3. A stamp hinge, a folded and gummed paper rectangle for affixing postage stamps in an album.

4. A principle, or a point in time, on which subsequent reasonings or events depend.

   • This argument was the hinge on which the question turned.

5. (statistics) The median of the upper or lower half of a batch, sample, or probability distribution.

6. One of the four cardinal points, east, west, north, or south.

7. A movement that presents itself as rotation when an off-centre fixed point is taken into account.

8. In polyamory, a person connected emotionally or sexually to two others who are not connected to each other.

9. (dialectal) To be in poor health; to be out of sorts.

verb

1. (transitive) To attach by, or equip with a hinge.

2. (intransitive, with on or upon) To depend on something.

3. (transitive, archaeology) The breaking off of the distal end of a knapped stone flake whose presumed course across the face of the stone core was truncated prematurely, leaving not a feathered distal end but instead the scar of a nearly perpendicular break.

   • The flake hinged at an inclusion in the core.

4. (obsolete) To bend.

5. To move or already be positioned in such a fashion that it presents itself as rotation when an off-centre fixed point is taken into account.