According to Wikipedia, "In architecture a corbel (or console) is a piece of stone jutting out of a wall to carry any superincumbent weight. A piece of timber projecting in the same way was called a 'tassel' or a 'bragger'." This strict definition, limiting the use of corbel to stone structures, may well be correct, but I have always seen the term used in relation to wooden carpenter gothic houses and other buldigs characteristic of nineteenth-century American architecture, and so that's why I use corbells for all these supports, regardless of the material from which they have been made.

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Last modified 17 July 2008