meaning of portal

1. A door or gate; hence, a way of entrance or exit, especially one that is grand and imposing.
2. The lesser gate, where there are two of different dimensions.
3. Formerly, a small square corner in a room separated from the rest of the apartment by wainscoting, forming a short passage to another apartment.
4. By analogy with the French portail, used by recent writers for the whole architectural composition which surrounds and includes the doorways and porches of a church.
5. The space, at one end, between opposite trusses when these are terminated by inclined braces.
6. A prayer book or breviary; a portass.
7. Of or pertaining to a porta, especially the porta of the liver; as, the portal vein, which enters the liver at the porta, and divides into capillaries after the manner of an artery.
8. PORTAL Process-Oriented Real-Time Algorithmic Language. ["PORTAL - A Pascal-based Real-Time Programming Language", R. Schild in Algorithmic Languages, J. W. deBakker et al eds, N-H 1981]. portal Web> A web site that aims to be an entry point to the World-Wide Web, typically offering a search engine and/or links to useful pages, and possibly news or other services. These services are usually provided for free in the hope that users will make the site their default home page or at least visit it often. Popular examples are Yahoo and MSN. Most portals on the Internet exist to generate advertising income for their owners, others may be focused on a specific group of users and may be part of an intranet or extranet. Some may just concentrate on one particular subject, say technology or medicine, and are known as a vertical portals.
9. a grand and imposing entrance often extended metaphorically; "the portals of the cathedral"; "the portals of heaven"; "the portals of ">success"

Related Words

portal | portal hypertension | portal site | portal system | portal vein |

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