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Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> Hi all
>
> In the Danish newsgroup about language, dk.kultur.sprog, we have
> been discussing the word "skyscraper" and the Danish and German
> parallels which are "skyskraber" and "Wolkenkratzer". In Danish
> there is only this one word, but in German one may also see
> "Himmelkratzer".
>
> I am therefore crossposting this message to that group also, and
> you are welcome to crosspost the answers as well.
>
> English - Danish - German:
> cloud   = sky    = Wolke
> sky     = himmel = Himmel
> heaven  = himmel = Himmel
>
> It seems that the word "skyscraper" was used in the late 1800's.
> Is it older?
>
> We have found "cloudscraper" both in old texts (1930+) and in
> recent texts. Is it commonly used?
>
> Which word came first?
>
> If one just looks at the words, it appears that Danish has been a
> transit language between English and German (sky => sky => Wolke
> or vice versa), but that is impropable. Do you know how the word
> has spread, or whether it has appeared independantly in the
> different countries?
>
> Similar expression seem to be very old (1500+) used about
> unusually high people.

OED has 'skyscraper' from 1794 as a nautical term

1. Naut. A triangular sky-sail.
   1794 Rigging & Seamanship 135 Sky-scrapers. These sails are triangular.+
The foot spreads half of the royal yards.
   2. colloq.  a. A high-standing horse. [A horse named Skyscraper, sired by
Highflyer, won the Epsom Derby in 1789
   b. A very tall man.
   1857 Slang Dict. 19, I say, old sky-scraper, is it cold up there?
   c. A rider on one of the high cycles formerly in use.
   1892 Daily News 7 Mar. 6/6 Riders of the ordinary [cycle]+are few and far
between, and are often derisively styled 'sky-scrapers'.
   ?d. A tall hat or bonnet. Obs.
   1800 W. Scott Let. 5 Apr. (1937) XII. 159 The trumpets call me to swagger
in a cockd skyscraper and sword.
   e. In Baseball, Cricket, etc., a ball propelled high in the air; a
towering hit, a skyer.
   1866 N.Y. Herald 27 June 5/5 Goodspeed made three handsome fly catches;
Mehl, Sweet and Dupignac each paying their share of attention to the
'skyscrapers'.
   3. An exaggerated or 'tall' story. nonce-use.
   1841 Lever C. O'Malley xxxiii, My yarn won't come so well after your
sky-scrapers of love.
   4. A high building of many stories, esp. one of those characteristic of
American cities.
   [1883 J. Moser in Amer. Architect & Building News 30 June 305 The capitol
building should always have a dome. I should raise thereon a gigantic
'sky-scraper', contrary to all precedent in practice.]

So the use for buildings is not cited earlier than 1883.

OED doesn't seem to know 'cloudscraper' and I don't recollect hearing it
myself.
--
John Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply

John Dean skrev:

>So the use for buildings is not cited earlier than 1883.

Thanks for a lot of info.

>OED doesn't seem to know 'cloudscraper' and I don't recollect hearing it
>myself.

I found it on this page:

http://www.sah.org/aame/biob.html

Search on the page for "cloudscraper".

-- 
Bertel
http://bertel.lundhansen.dk/	FIDUSO: http://fiduso.dk/

Speaking of skyscrapers, I had heard that all of the New York City
skyscrapers are in Manhattan, except for one in Queens. True?

John Dean:
>> OED doesn't seem to know 'cloudscraper' and I don't recollect hearing it
>> myself.
 
Bertel Hansen:
> I found it on this page:
> http://www.sah.org/aame/biob.html
 
Oh, but the context is interesting too -- under Leroy S. Buffington,
it says:

#  An architect, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, February 16, 1931.
#  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1848.  He was the designer of
#  the first skyscraper.  At the patent office in Washington the
#  original drawing and the grant of a patent, 1888, on the world's
#  first skyscraper are on file.  He called his dream building a
#  "cloudscraper".  One of his old drawings showed plans for a building
#  one hundred stories high. ...

First, I was somewhat surprised to see that the Society of Archi-
tectural Historians thinks that there *is* such a thing as a "first
skyscraper", when the word is usually defined in vague terms like
"a very tall building" (as <http://www.m-w.com> puts it).  Evidently
they have a more specific criterion in mind; perhaps Jim Ward also
did in his branch of the thread where he asked which boroughs of
New York have them.

Anyway, it sounds from the passage as though "cloudscraper" was an
*attempted* neologism that never caught on.  Or as Bill Bryson would
say, here once again we have a case of an inventor who *did not know
the correct name for his invention*.

Once you exclude the "Krosan Cloudscraper" that comes up in a certain
game, Google still has almost 100 hits on "cloudscraper".  Some refer
to tall buildings, some to other tall objects such as transmission
towers# or mountains.

# - Some people might count these as buildings -- I see that the
CN Tower management now asserts at <http://www.cntower.ca> a claim
to its being the world's "tallest building".  When constructed it
was carefully described only as the "tallest freestanding structure",
on the grounds that a "building" must have enclosed space designed
for occupancy over most of its height, and I would agree with that.
-- 
Mark Brader            We say, "But it wasn't designed to do that!";
Toronto                our managers say, "Our customers want this!";
msb@vex.net            we say, "Small is beautiful!"; and they say,
                       "Money is beautiful!"    -- Andrew Tannenbaum

My text in this article is in the public domain.

Jim Ward:
> Speaking of skyscrapers, I had heard that all of the New York City
> skyscrapers are in Manhattan, except for one in Queens.  True?

First you have to define "skyscraper".  Apparently the tallest
building in New York outside Manhattan is indeed in Queens, the
Citibank Tower at about 650 feet; but Brooklyn's Williamsburgh
Savings Bank Building is 512 feet tall.

My googling didn't turn up any notably tall buildings in the other
two boroughs, though.
-- 
Mark Brader              "After all, it is necessary to get behind
Toronto                   someone before you can stab them in the back."
msb@vex.net                      -- Lynn & Jay, "Yes, Prime Minister"

My text in this article is in the public domain.

John Dean wrote:
 > Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
 >
 >> Hi all
 >>
 >> In the Danish newsgroup about language, dk.kultur.sprog, we have
 >> been discussing the word "skyscraper" and the Danish and German
 >> parallels which are "skyskraber" and "Wolkenkratzer". In Danish
 >> there is only this one word, but in German one may also see
 >> "Himmelkratzer".
[large snip]
 > So the use for buildings is not cited earlier than 1883.

I wonder whether it has been used since the 1970s. "High rise" seems to
have taken over.



-- 
Rob Bannister

On Sat, 9 Aug 2003, Mark Brader wrote:

> Jim Ward:
> > Speaking of skyscrapers, I had heard that all of the New York City
> > skyscrapers are in Manhattan, except for one in Queens.  True?
>
> First you have to define "skyscraper".  Apparently the tallest
> building in New York outside Manhattan is indeed in Queens, the
> Citibank Tower at about 650 feet; but Brooklyn's Williamsburgh
> Savings Bank Building is 512 feet tall.

The definition of 'skyscraper' has been continually narrowing.  When
the word was coined, I think it was meant to include tall-steepled
churches (I'm pretty sure I've seen a 19c reference to Lower
Manhattan's Trinity Church as a 'skyscraper'; the well-known Flatiron
Building in Manhattan was once its tallest skyscraper, but today no one
would consider it one).

As a Native Brooklynite, my intuition is that the Williamsburgh Savings
Bank Tower in downtown Brooklyn (Fourth Largest City in America), known
in the local dialect as "the Clock Building", is *not* a skyscraper,
possibly because there aren't any other nearby buildings that it can
share the status with; possibly because it's so much less tall than the
taller buildings in Manhattan, or seems so.  As a Former Queens
Resident (TWDLTTAT), and as someone who briefly worked near the
Citicorp Tower in Long Island City, Queens, my intuition is that,
similarly, it's not a skyscraper in the strong sense.  It's just a tall
building, and an ugly one at that.

But it may be argued that I'm being unreasonable in not thinking of the
Clock Building or the Citicorp Tower as skyscrapers.  It may also be
that 'skyscraper' is no longer a very useful word, but I wouldn't say
so.

Yes, you have to define 'skyscraper'.

"Mark Brader" <msb@vex.net> wrote in message
news:vjaaaf5c7q8n3d@corp.supernews.com...

> First you have to define "skyscraper".  Apparently the tallest
> building in New York outside Manhattan is indeed in Queens, the
> Citibank Tower at about 650 feet; but Brooklyn's Williamsburgh
> Savings Bank Building is 512 feet tall.

Debate so far seems to have omitted:
1.  Actual American buildings over 8 storeys
date only from the perfection of the Otis elevator
(1890?):  to which buildings (Louis Sullivan's
Flatiron Bldg. and others) the English skyscraper
was applied.
2.  French supports the English origin of the
word:  gratte-ciel is an exact translation.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada)
dphillipson[at]trytel.com