The ends are the narrow side of the building?

Solving a crossword puzzle or reading an interesting article, you may have to deal with the word "butt" or "ends". Many people can say that the answer is quite simple. But this is only at first glance.

What is the butt?

In Russian there are about five transcripts of this word. They refer to construction, to geometry, to the names of settlements and rivers. And few people realize that the meaning of the word "ends" is completely different. Now we'll figure it out.

Butts are a word that came from thieves' use and means "matches". And we can say with confidence that very few people know about this. Thieves' lingo is rarely used in the everyday life of ordinary citizens.

A bit about matches

The first mention of matches appeared in the Chinese empire more than two thousand years ago. Then they looked like thin rays with ends saturated with sulfur. Such a device helped to reduce the time of ignition of the hearth, the torch from smoldering tinder. At that time tinder and flint were the most common methods of mining fire.

In the Middle Ages, matches appeared in Europe. Then they had a slightly different look, and several people fought for the right to be called the inventor. But the most similar to the modern, they were already at the end of the eighteenth, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Their peculiarity was that each manufactory engaged in production used its technology for the fuel head. One of the inventors came up with a very sensitive composition, which could provoke the burning of matches by rubbing against each other.

Perhaps the word "ends" - this is about the process of obtaining fire. After all, wooden sticks could be lit by scribbling about any rough surface: the sole of the shoes, rough fabric, fairly even stone.

Other meanings of the word

Someone may be indignant and say that the ends are side parts of any structure that are not on the "front" part of the building. They will also be right. Though with this concept it is necessary to be cautious. After all, buildings that have arches, colonnades and central entrances, in the narrow part, are called "end faces" are undesirable.

The ends are also separate parts of the wooden tile used to build the pavement. Most often this happened in those areas where wood was abundant in the nearest forests. So in ancient Novgorod, the layers of wooden slabs were superimposed on each other for more than four centuries.

If you get the word "butt", perhaps its meaning is much more interesting than it may seem at first glance.