stilted

adj

1. Making use of or possessing a stilt or stilts, or things resembling stilts; raised on stilts.

   “And laugh at this fantaſtic Mummery, / This antic Prelude of groteſque Events, / Where Dwarfs are often ſtilted, and betray / A Littleneſs of ſoul by Worlds o'er-run, / And Nations laid in blood.”

   “The state of husbandry is very far behind. The plough generally used is the single stilted one. In using this kind of plough, the ploughman bends towards the soil, and well merits the title of curvus arator, bestowed by Virgil on the Italian ploughman. [...] The two-stilted plough is beginning to be used; but the general opinion is against it.”

   “The crane and fowls of a like kind, seem to hold a middle place between land and water fowls, as they have separate toes like land fowls, but the bills and legs of the aquatic orders. [...] From the length of their legs they are called grallic, or stilted.”

   “As for her brother, they being now arrived where the rude and antique instruments of Zetland agriculture lay scattered in the usual confusion of a Scottish barn-yard, his thoughts were at once engrossed in the deficiencies of the one-stilted plough—of the twiscar, with which they dig peats—of the sledges, on which they transport commodities—of all and every thing, in short, in which the usages of the islands differed from that of the main land of Scotland.”

   “[W]e have still more striking instances in the large clouded-wing crane fly (Tipula gigantea, Meigen), popularly termed father longlegs, or jenny-spinner, their stilted legs enabling these insects to overtop the grass as they walk in the meadows, in the same way as our imaginary giraffe would overtop the trees in a forest.”

2. (figuratively)Elevated or raised in a contrived or unnatural way; stiff and artificially formal or pompous; also, depending on redundant, unnecessary elements.

   “He gave a stilted bow and left.”

   “Untutored intellects are pleased with its frothy sentiment and its florid language, just as young and uneducated eyes are delighted with the gaudy hues of coloured prints in aquatinta. But though the tinsel of this stilted prose greatly contributed to [Salomon] Gessner's success in this and in every other country where his work has been naturalized, the story was not less essentially in its favour.”

   “Tired of this popinjay's stupid vanity and stilted affectation, and having a cheerless and dreary prospect before him, he reflected that every thing is worth something.”

   “The general usages of the American Navy are founded upon the usages that prevailed in the Navy of monarchical England more than a century ago; nor have they been materially altered since. [...] [T]here still lingers in American men-of-war all the stilted etiquette and childish parade of the old-fashioned Spanish court of Madrid.”

   “The stilted sentences of his written sermon seemed no longer worth the agony of descending that abyss of surge to rescue. He felt grateful to those flickering shapes of human beings below, and he was filled with a desire to talk to them simply for just as long as he felt they were listening to him.”

3. Of a building or architectural feature such as an arch or vault: supported by stilts (“supporting pillars or posts”); also (generally) having the main part raised above the usual level by some structure.

   “In Winchester Cathedral and Romsey Abbey Church, we have examples of what is called the stilted or horse-shoe arch, which is where the curvature of the arch does not spring immediately from the capitals or imposts of the piers, but the extreme points of the semicircle are continued straight down below the spring of the curve before they rest on the imposts, thus giving the idea of an arch stilted or raised, and somewhat approximating in form that of a horse-shoe.”

   “The stilted arch was a good and much used expedient in ancient and modern times.”

   “The tombs have similar tombstones, each fashioned out of a rectangular block topped with another block in the form of a half drum, and with stilted semi-circular slabs for the head and foot stones.”

verb

1. (form-of, participle, past)simple past and past participle of stilt