doorframe

UK/ˈdɔːˌfɹeɪm/US/ˈdɔɹˌfɹeɪm/

nounB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: doorframes

A doorframe is the wooden or metal border fixed around a doorway. The door itself hangs on it.

It is the part that stays when the door is taken off, and it carries the hinges on one side and the latch plate on the other. Builders call the vertical pieces jambs, the top the head and the bottom the threshold. Marking children's heights on one is a domestic tradition, which is why people photograph them before moving. British English writes it as one word or two.

Definitions of doorframe

1noundoorframeThe frame surrounding a doorway, to which the door is fixed.B1
“He leaned against the doorframe and waited.”

Also accepted in games: door frame

Where it comes from

From door + frame.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

doorframe in the wild

The smoothed margins of such a face together resemble a doorframe, and the word, created by the ancients, is allusive.
Anathyrosis
For that purpose a staircase and doorframe were made in the structure, which had been up to that point a solid building.
Drususstein
A relief of the family crest of the In der Maur family, the original owners, was added above the second floor exterior doorframe in 1676.
Ansitz Baron von Widmann
When the saint died, the threshold and doorframe of his cell had to be dismantled to remove his swollen body.
Benjamin of Nitria
The door has panels of eight raised lozenges in octagonal surrounds in a plain doorframe.
Nawton Tower

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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