• Envelope

    Pronunciation

    • RP IPA: /ˈɛn.vÉ™.ləʊp/, /ˈɒn.vÉ™.ləʊp/
    • US enPR: än′vÉ™'lōp; IPA: /ˈɛn.vəˌloÊŠp/, /ˈɑn.vəˌloÊŠp/

    Origin 1

    From the French enveloppe, from envelopper.

    Full definition of envelope

    Noun

    envelope

    (plural envelopes)
    1. A paper or cardboard wrapper used to enclose small, flat items, especially letters, for mailing.
      • 2013-06-14, Jonathan Freedland, Obama's once hip brand is now tainted, Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.
    2. Something that envelops; a wrapping.
    3. A bag containing the lifting gas of a balloon or airship; fabric that encloses the gas-bags of an airship.
      • 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Ryan, Jr, The airship's potential for intertheater and intratheater airlift, They have no internal or external support structure, being simply a fabric bag (or envelope) filled with a lighter than air gas. Inside the envelope are one or more "ballonets", or smaller bags, which help maintain the envelope's shape.
    4. (geometry) A mathematical curve, surface, or higher-dimensional object that is the tangent to a given family of lines, curves, surfaces, or higher-dimensional objects.
    5. (electronics) A curve that bounds another curve or set of curves, as the modulation envelope of an amplitude-modulated carrier wave in electronics.
    6. (music) The shape of a sound, which may be controlled by a synthesizer or sampler.
    7. (computing) The information used for routing an email that is transmitted with the email but not part of its contents.
    8. (biology) An enclosing structure or cover, such as a membrane.
    9. (engineering) The set of limitations within which a technological system can perform safely and effectively.
    10. (astronomy) The nebulous covering of the head or nucleus of a comet; a coma.
    11. An earthwork in the form of a single parapet or a small rampart, sometimes raised in the ditch and sometimes beyond it.

    Synonyms

    • (something that envelops): wrapper
    • (bag containing the lifting gas): gasbag

    Pronunciation

    • enPR: Ä•n-vÄ•l'É™p, IPA: /É›nˈvÉ›lÉ™p/
    • for audio, see envelop

    Origin 2

    See envelop.

    Verb

    1. (nonstandard) Alternative spelling of envelop----
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