Other forms: thresholds
The threshold is the strip of floor under a door — the line where outside stops and inside begins. You wipe your feet on it, the cat sits in it with half of itself in the sun, and a groom is supposed to carry his bride over it.
The use you will meet far more often is the level at which something starts to count: a pain threshold, a tax threshold, the noise threshold at which a sensor trips. Earnings above the threshold are taxed differently. You cross a threshold, and a government raises or lowers one. On the threshold of means right at the beginning of something big — on the threshold of a career, of a discovery. Spell it with a single h in the middle, threshold, whatever it sounds like when people say it out loud.
1nounlogicThe level at which something begins to happen or begins to count.~79%
“Anyone earning below the threshold pays no tax at all.”
synonyms: limit, cut-off point
2nounthresholdThe strip of floor under a doorway; the doorway itself, thought of as a line you cross.~19%
“He stopped on the threshold and knocked twice.”
3nounbeginningThe very beginning of something new.~2%
“The team stood on the threshold of its first final in forty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 171 sentences found in the wild and placed 139 of them on a sense (32 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
THRESH-old → FRESH
A fresh loaf of bread lies across the wooden strip under the front door. Everyone coming into the house has to step over the bread, and two hundred years of feet have worn a dip in that wood.
hooks ontofresh
Old English þresċold, the doorsill, built on a verb meaning to thresh — and before that, simply to tread: the threshold is the board your feet find first. Some people say it thresh-hold, as though the second half were the word hold. It never was — the h belongs to thresh.
Proto-Germanic
*þreskudlaz
Old English
þresċold — doorsill, entryway
Middle English
threschwolde
English, today
threshold
Built from
From Middle English threschwolde, threscholde, from Old English þresċold (“doorsill, entryway”), from Proto-Germanic þreskudlaz, þreskūþlijaz, þreskwaþluz, from Proto-Germanic þreskaną, þreskwaną (“to thresh, (originally) to tread”), from Proto-Indo-European terh₁- (“to rub, turn”). Cognate with Low German Drüssel (“threshold”), dialectal German Drischaufel, Drissufle, Trüschübel (“threshold”), Danish tærskel (“threshold”), Norwegian Bokmål terskel (“threshold”), Norwegian Nynorsk treskald (“threshold”), Swedish tröskel (“threshold”), dialectal Swedish träskvald (“threshold”), Icelandic þröskuldur (“threshold”). Pronunciations such as “thresh-hold” are un-etymological and result from analogy with hold.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA