Dictionary

pantechnicon

Pronunciation

Noun

pantechnicon (plural pantechnicons)

(chiefly, Britain) A building or place house#Verb|housing shops or stalls where all sorts of (especially exotic) manufactured articles are collected for sale. [from 19th c.]
(chiefly, Britain) Originally pantechnicon van: a van, especially a large moving or removal van. [from 19th c.]
- 1911, Arnold Bennett, The Card: A Story of Adventure in the Five Towns, London: Methuen Publishing, OCLC 492063506 ↗; republished Toronto, Ont.: William Briggs, 1910s, OCLC 225424669 ↗, page 69 ↗:
  The pantechnicon was running away. It had perceived the wrath to come and was fleeing. Its guardians had evidently left it imperfectly scotched or braked, and it had got loose. […] [T]he onrush of the pantechnicon constituted a clear crisis. Lower down the gradient of Brougham Street was more dangerous, and it was within the possibilities that people inhabiting the depths of the street might find themselves pitched out of bed by the sharp corner of a pantechnicon that was determined to be a pantechnicon.
- 1978, Lawrence Durrell, Livia: Or Buried Alive: A Novel, London: Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0-571-11297-5; republished in The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, Quinx, London: Faber and Faber, 1992, ISBN 978-0-571-16328-1, page 426:
  In fact, as they later found, the auxiliary vehicle was a very large removers' van – the kind known as a pantechnicon.

Synonyms

This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.004