Stucco

Stucco

Noun & Verb · /ˈstʌkəʊ/ · a fine plaster used to coat and decorate walls and ceilings

Definition

Stucco is a fine plaster or cement mixture applied to exterior and interior walls, ceilings, and architectural surfaces both to protect them and to give them a smooth, textured, or ornamental finish. It can be left plain and painted, or worked while wet into elaborate decorative mouldings, reliefs, and carvings. As a verb, to stucco a wall means to apply stucco to it. Stucco has been a central material in architecture for thousands of years, used on everything from ancient Greek temples to Baroque palace interiors to the sun-baked villas of southern California.

Origin

Stucco came into English in the seventeenth century from Italian stucco, which derived from Old High German stucchi — meaning a fragment or crust. The word arrived in Italy via the Germanic tribes who swept through the Roman Empire, where it fused with Roman plastering traditions that stretched back to ancient Greece. By the Renaissance, Italian craftsmen had elevated stucco into a high art form, and the word travelled into English along with the techniques and the craftsmen themselves.