ˈheel-piece, n.
1. The piece forming or covering the heel. a. The part of a shoe, etc. which forms its heel; a piece added to the heel.
| 1709 Brit. Apollo II. No. 65. 2/2 A pair of Heel-pieces. 1733 Swift On Poetry 173 Like a Heel-piece to support A Cripple with one Foot too short. 1858 Simmonds Dict. Trade 192/1 Heeling..putting new heel-pieces to boots. |
b. Armour for the heel; that part of the solleret which bore the spur.
| 1828 Webster, citing Chesterfield. |
c. The piece forming the heel of a mast or the like.
| 1794 Rigging & Seamanship I. 27 The heel-piece..coaks on to the heel of the lower tree, and the head-piece to the upper tree. |
d. Shipbuilding. An angle-bar joining the heels of a frame across the keel.
| 1904 A. C. Holms Pract. Shipbuilding I. 471 The frame heel pieces are usually fitted when the frames are screwed up ready for riveting. |
e. Electr. The iron bar connecting the soft iron cores in an electro-magnet.
| 1904 M. M. Kirkman Telegr. & Telephone 29 The magnet is constructed of a bar or heel piece of soft iron, into which are screwed two pencil-shaped pieces of iron which form the cores of the magnets. |
2. fig. The end-piece; the conclusion.
| 1761 Lloyd Cobbler Tessington's Let. 16 And then it griev'd me sore to look Just at the heel-piece of his book. 1786 Francis, Philanthr. III. 176 That great furnisher of theatric heel-pieces. |
Hence heel-piece v. trans., to put a heel-piece on.
| 1712 Arbuthnot John Bull iii. vii, Some blamed Mrs. Bull for new heelpiecing of her shoes. 1826 Miss Mitford Village Ser. ii. (1863) 442, I don't think he has had so much as a job of heel-piecing to do since [etc.]. |