Cut glass or cut-glass is a technique and a style of decorating glass. For some time the style has often been produced by other techniques such as the use of moulding, but the original technique of cutting glass on an abrasive wheel is still used in luxury products. On

glassware upTypical drinkware The list of glassware includes drinking vessels (drinkware) and tableware used to set a table for eating a meal, general glass items such as vases, and glasses used in the catering industry. It does not include laboratory glas ...

vessels, the style typically consists of furrowed faces at angles to each other in complicated patterns, while for lighting fixtures, the style consists of flat or curved

facet Facets () are flat faces on geometric shapes. The organization of naturally occurring facets was key to early developments in crystallography, since they reflect the underlying symmetry of the crystal structure. Gemstones commonly have facets cut ...

s on small hanging pieces, often all over. Historically, cut glass was shaped using "coldwork" techniques of grinding or drilling, applied as a secondary stage to a piece of glass made by conventional processes such as

glassblowing Glassblowing is a glassforming technique that involves inflating molten glass into a bubble (or parison) with the aid of a blowpipe (or blow tube). A person who blows glass is called a ''glassblower'', ''glassmith'', or ''gaffer''. A '' lampworke ...

. Today, the glass is often mostly or entirely shaped in the initial process by using a mould (

pressed glass Pressed glass (or pattern glass)
is a form of

plastic Plastics are a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic materials that use polymers as a main ingredient. Their plasticity makes it possible for plastics to be moulded, extruded or pressed into solid objects of various shapes. This adaptab ...

. Traditional hand-cutting continues, but gives a much more expensive product.

Lead glass Lead glass, commonly called crystal, is a variety of glass in which lead replaces the calcium content of a typical potash glass. Lead glass contains typically 18–40% (by weight) lead(II) oxide (PbO), while modern lead crystal, historically al ...

has long been misleadingly called "crystal" by the industry, evoking the glamour and expense of

rock crystal Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical form ...

, or carved transparent

quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica ( silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical ...

, and most manufacturers now describe their product as cut crystal glass. There are two main types of object made using cut glass: firstly drinking glasses and their accompanying

decanter A decanter is a vessel that is used to hold the decantation of a liquid (such as wine) which may contain sediment. Decanters, which have a varied shape and design, have been traditionally made from glass or crystal. Their volume is usually equ ...

s and

jug A jug is a type of container commonly used to hold liquids. It has an opening, sometimes narrow, from which to pour or drink, and has a handle, and often a pouring lip. Jugs throughout history have been made of metal, and ceramic, or glass, and ...

s, and secondly chandeliers and other light fittings. Both began to be made using the cut glass style in England around 1730, following the development there of a reliable process for making very clear

lead glass Lead glass, commonly called crystal, is a variety of glass in which lead replaces the calcium content of a typical potash glass. Lead glass contains typically 18–40% (by weight) lead(II) oxide (PbO), while modern lead crystal, historically al ...

with a high

refractive index In optics, the refractive index (or refraction index) of an optical medium is a dimensionless number that gives the indication of the light bending ability of that medium. The refractive index determines how much the path of light is bent, or ...

. Cut glass requires relatively thick glass, as the cutting removes much of the depth, and earlier clear glass would mostly have appeared rather cloudy if made thick enough to cut. For both types of object, some pieces are still made in traditional styles, broadly similar to those of the 18th century, but other glassmakers have applied modern design styles. Expensive drinking glasses had previously mostly concentrated on elegant shapes of extreme thinness. If there was decoration it was mostly either internal, with hollow bubble or coloured spirals within the stem ("twists"), or surface decoration in

enamelled glass Enamelled glass or painted glass is glass which has been decorated with vitreous enamel (powdered glass, usually mixed with a binder) and then fired to fuse the glasses. It can produce brilliant and long-lasting colours, and be translucent or o ...

glass engraving Engraved glass is a type of decorated glass that involves shallowly engraving the surface of a glass object, either by holding it against a rotating wheel, or manipulating a "diamond point" in the style of an engraving burin. It is a subgroup of ...

. Outside Venice and Spain, lighting fittings had not previously made much use of glass in Europe; the enamelled

mosque lamp Mosque lamps of enamelled glass, often with gilding, survive in considerable numbers from the Islamic art of the Middle Ages, especially the 13th and 14th centuries, with Cairo in Egypt and Aleppo and Damascus in Syria the most important centres ...

Islamic art Islamic art is a part of Islamic culture and encompasses the visual arts produced since the 7th century CE by people who lived within territories inhabited or ruled by Muslim populations. Referring to characteristic traditions across a wide ra ...

was a different matter. But cut glass "drops", faceted in a style derived from

gem cutting Lapidary (from the Latin ) is the practice of shaping stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems (including cameos), and faceted designs. A person who practices lapidary is known as a lapidarist. A lap ...

jewellery Jewellery ( UK) or jewelry (U.S.) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a wester ...

refracted In physics, refraction is the redirection of a wave as it passes from one medium to another. The redirection can be caused by the wave's change in speed or by a change in the medium. Refraction of light is the most commonly observed phenomeno ...

and spread the light in way that was new, and were enthusiastically embraced by makers and their customers. The main skeleton of the chandelier was very often metal, but this was often all but hidden by a profusion of faceted glass pieces, held in place by metal wire.

Technique

The technique changed very little between the description by

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic ' ...

in the first century AD and the end of the 19th century. It has always used a small rotating wheel of, or coated with, some abrasive substance, and usually with a liquid lubricant such as water, perhaps mixed with sand, falling onto the area being worked and then being collected below. The wheels were originally powered by

treadle A treadle (from oe, tredan, "to tread") is a mechanism operated with a pedal for converting reciprocating motion into rotating motion. Along with cranks, treadmills, and treadwheels, treadles allow human and animal machine power in the absen ...

s, but by the mid-19th century workshops had several stations linked to steam power. Today electric power is used. For cutting flat facets a turntable device called a "

lap A lap is a surface (usually horizontal) created between the knee and hips of a biped when it is in a seated or lying down position. The lap of a parent or loved one is seen as a physically and psychologically comfortable place for a child to ...

", already used in gem-cutting, was adopted. Typically the design is marked with paint on the glass before cutting – in England red is usually used. One advantage of cut glass for the manufacturer is that it can very often be arranged for the small flaws such as bubbles that are inevitable in a proportion of glass pieces, and would lead to a clear piece being rejected, to be placed in the areas to be cut away. Conversely, if imitation cut glass using moulds is made, the complexity of the mould shapes greatly increases the number of faults and rejects. A second operation polishes the cut glass, traditionally using a wooden or

cork Cork or CORK may refer to: Materials * Cork (material), an impermeable buoyant plant product ** Cork (plug), a cylindrical or conical object used to seal a container ***Wine cork Places Ireland * Cork (city) ** Metropolitan Cork, also known as G ...

wheel "fed with putty powder and water". At the end of the 19th century an alternative method using acid was introduced, which "gives a dull finish and tends to round off the edges of the cuts". Labour was the main cost in making cut glass. Arguing against the reduction of

tariff A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or by a supranational union on imports or exports of goods. Besides being a source of revenue for the government, import duties can also be a form of regulation of foreign trade and pol ...

s in 1888, a leading figure in the American industry claimed that "We take a piece of glass .... costing 20 cents and .... in many cases put $36 of labor on it".

History

Emmanuel College Chapel 2, Cambridge, UK - Diliff (cropped)

Technically, the decorative "cutting" of glass is very ancient, although the term "cut glass" generally refers to pieces from the 18th century onwards. The

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...

Indus Valley civilization made glass beads that were engraved with simple shapes.

Ancient Roman glass Roman glass objects have been recovered across the Roman Empire in domestic, industrial and funerary contexts. Glass was used primarily for the production of vessels, although mosaic tiles and window glass were also produced. Roman glass productio ...

used a variety of techniques, but mostly large amounts of drilling, often followed by polishing, to produce the deeply under-cut

cage cup A cage cup, also ''vas diatretum'', plural ''diatreta'', or "reticulated cup" is a type of luxury late Roman glass vessel, found from roughly the 4th century, and "the pinnacle of Roman achievements in glass-making". ''Diatreta'' consist of ...

s, objects of extreme luxury,

cameo glass Cameo glass is a luxury form of glass art produced by cameo glass engraving or etching and carving through fused layers of differently colored glass to produce designs, usually with white opaque glass figures and motifs on a dark-colored backgroun ...

in two colours, and objects cut in

relief Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces are bonded to a solid background of the same material. The term '' relief'' is from the Latin verb ''relevo'', to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that th ...

, of which the

Lycurgus Cup The Lycurgus Cup is a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front. It is the only ...

is the outstanding survivor.

, especially that of the Fatimid court in Egypt, valued bowls and other objects in "carved", that is, cut

(

, a clear mineral), and this style was also produced in glass, which was cheaper and easier to work. Cameo glass was also produced. Similar

effects were also achieved even more cheaply in mould-blown glass. The 13 or 14 surviving examples of the so-called

Hedwig glass Hedwig glasses or Hedwig beakers are a type of glass beaker originating in the Middle East or Norman Sicily and dating from the 10th-12th centuries AD. They are named after the Silesian princess Saint Hedwig (1174–1245), to whom three of them ...

es were probably made by Islamic artists, but perhaps for the European market. Perhaps from the 12th century, they are either very late examples of Islamic glass-cutting, or isolated ones of medieval European use of the technique. Very shallowly scratched or cut

engraved glass Engraved glass is a type of decorated glass that involves shallowly engraving the surface of a glass object, either by holding it against a rotating wheel, or manipulating a "diamond point" in the style of an engraving burin. It is a subgroup of ...

was revived by at least the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...

, but there was very little use of deeper cutting which, however, continued to be used in rock crystal and other forms of hardstone cutting. In Germany in the late 17th and early 18th centuries there was a revival, for "two generations", of cut

decoration, water-powered and imitating rock crystal. Typical pieces were cups and goblets with coats of arms surrounded by rich Baroque ornament, with the background cut away to leave the reliefs raised. This is called the ''Hochschnitt'' ("high cut") style. In the later 17th century

George Ravenscroft George Ravenscroft (1632 – 7 June 1683) was an English businessman in the import/export and glass making trades. He is primarily known for his work in developing clear lead crystal glass (also known as flint glass) in England. Personal life L ...

developed a cheap and reliable lead "crystal" glass with a high refractive index in England, which various other glassmakers adopted. After some time, the potential of cut glass using this basic material began to be realized; a high

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

content also made the glass easier to cut.

Chandeliers

In the early 18th century, bevelled edges to large mirrors became fashionable in England, achieved by rubbing with abrasives, but also by "cutting". The making of "looking glasses" was a different branch of glassmaking from the makers of drinking glasses, and it seems to have been in the former that "the craft of cutting was born", and the mirrormakers were the workshops who expanded into chandeliers. A London glassmaker advertised in 1727 that he sold "Looking Glasses, Coach Glasses and Glass Shandeliers". The earliest examples, like that given to the chapel in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1732, were glass versions of the standard brass designs long used in England, imported or locally-made versions of a Netherlandish and north French design style that had been developed since the 15th century. Around the mid-century, designs took up the use of multiple faceted pendants, which had been used in the enormously expensive chandeliers of the French court, where instead of glass carved clear

(quartz) had been used. Over the rest of the 18th century, and the early part of the next the number of drops increased, and the main stem of the chandelier, typically in metal, tended to disappear behind long chains of them. By the

Regency period The Regency era of British history officially spanned the years 1811 to 1820, though the term is commonly applied to the longer period between and 1837. King George III succumbed to mental illness in late 1810 and, by the Regency Act 1811, h ...

there might be "some thirty drops in perhaps six or eight graded sizes, and each drop might have 32 facets on each side. Costs soared." The dominance of cut glass in other lighting devices such as

candlestick A candlestick is a device used to hold a candle in place. Candlesticks have a cup or a spike ("pricket") or both to keep the candle in place. Candlesticks are less frequently called "candleholders". Before the proliferation of electricity, candl ...

sconce Sconce may refer to: *Sconce (fortification), a military fortification *Sconce (light fixture) *Sconcing, imposing a penalty in the form of drink *Sconce Point Fort Victoria is a former military fort on the Isle of Wight, England (), built to ...

girandole A girandole (; from French, in turn from Italian ''girandola'') is an ornamental branched candlestick or light fixture consisting of several lights, often resembling a small chandelier. Girandoles came into use about the second half of the 17th ce ...

s, and lamps was never as complete, but all were often made in it. By 1800 it was already common to dismantle chandeliers and reconfigure them into a more fashionable shape, and subsequently most old chandeliers have been converted from candles to electricity, often after a period as

gasolier A chandelier (; also known as girandole, candelabra lamp, or least commonly suspended lights) is a branched ornamental light fixture designed to be mounted on ceilings or walls. Chandeliers are often ornate, and normally use incandescent l ...

s using

lamp oil Kerosene, paraffin, or lamp oil is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from el, κηρός (''keros'') meaning "wax", and was regi ...

. File:Three step chandelier.JPG, Oddly-sited Victorian chandelier File:Chandelier-2381625.jpg, Detail of cut glass "drops" or pendants File:Shabestan Imam large luster.jpg, Large modern chandelier being worked on, Iran.

Vessels

Starting out by decorating mainly wine glasses, decanters and other drinkware, by the 19th century cut glass was used for a variety of

tableware Tableware is any dish or dishware used for setting a table, serving food, and dining. It includes cutlery, glassware, serving dishes, and other items for practical as well as decorative purposes. The quality, nature, variety and number of o ...

shapes, mostly those associated with desserts ("sweetmeat glass" is a term used by collectors), and for bowls and trays either for use at the table or in the drawing room. These larger shapes allowed the room for cutters to produce many of the most interesting and characteristic cut designs, which experts can often date rather precisely, as they passed through several different styles. Starting with the

Rococo Rococo (, also ), less commonly Roccoco or Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, ...

, there were Neoclassical and Regency styles, and finally one with "Gothic" arches by about 1840. The Regency style added to the 18th-century diamond shapes zones with many parallel bands, furrows, or flutes, either vertical or horizontal, initially rather narrow, but later wider, in the "broad flute" style. From about 1800 to 1840 "almost all British luxury table glass was cut", and the style spread to Europe and North America. English cutters were instructing French workers at the Saint-Louis glass factory by 1781, and later Belgian cutters at

Val Saint Lambert Val Saint Lambert is a Belgian crystal glassware manufacturer, founded in 1826 and based in Seraing. It has the royal warrant of King Albert II. Pre-history – Vonêche glassworks In 1795 during the War of the First Coalition which brought abo ...

by 1826. On wine glasses and similar shapes, the rim where the drinker's mouth would touch was left smooth, but the bowl, especially the lower part, the stem, and the foot might be cut. A starburst on the underside of the foot was common. On jugs, cups for eating desserts from, and bowls the rim was often cut with zig-zags or other ornament. Especially in the 18th century, cutting was often combined with

above, and by the 1840s it was popular to have areas of "frosting", rubbing the glass with abrasives to reduce its transparency. Competition from cheaper, but lower quality

pressed glass Pressed glass (or pattern glass)
is a form of

glass blank A glass blank is a piece of glass that requires additional decoration before it is considered finished. Types of decoration include cutting, engraving, acid-etching, gilding, and enameling. Often the term blank is used in reference to an uncut p ...

s from the glassmakers. In the 1870s Bohemian cutters began to arrive in

Corning, New York Corning is a city in Steuben County, New York, United States, on the Chemung River. The population was 10,551 at the 2020 census. It is named for Erastus Corning, an Albany financier and railroad executive who was an investor in the company t ...

, one of the centres of the industry, supplementing English immigrants. File:Sweetmeat Glass (England), 1760–80 (CH 18621563) (cropped).jpg, Dessert glass, England, 1760–80 File:Bowl, 1820–30 (CH 18621339).jpg, Bowl, 1820–30, English File:Jug (Ireland), early 19th century (CH 18621221).jpg, Irish jug, early 19th century File:Vase (possibly England), ca. 1835 (CH 18621547) (cropped).jpg, English (?) vase, c. 1835

1850 onwards

The centrepiece at the crossing of

the Crystal Palace The Crystal Palace was a cast iron and plate glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition took place from 1 May to 15 October 1851, and more than 14,000 exhibitors from around th ...

holding the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was a huge glass fountain (8.25 metres or 27 feet high), including much cut glass, by the leading

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...

firm of F. & C. Ostler. Cut glass had dominated both its main market niches for several decades, but a number of factors were about to challenge it, at least as far as vessels were concerned. The Victorian taste for over-ornamentation was beginning to take over, and some of the cut glass displayed at the Great Exhibition was described as "prickly monstrosities". In the year of the exhibition, the hugely influential critic

John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and pol ...

, in his ''

Modern Painters ''Modern Painters'' (1843–1860) is a five-volume work by the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, begun when he was 24 years old based on material collected in Switzerland in 1842. Ruskin argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of ...

'', denounced the whole technique, writing "We ought to be ashamed of it" and "all cut glass is barbarous, for the cutting conceals its ductility and confuses it with

ock Ock or OCK may refer to: * River Ock (disambiguation), three rivers in England * Ok (Korean name), also spelt Ock **Ock Joo-hyun (born 1980), South Korean K-pop singer and musical theatre actress * Océano Club de Kerkennah, a Tunisian football cl ...

crystal". At the same time, and further stimulated by the Great Exhibition itself, the British style was spreading across the Western world, and in particular cut American and

Bohemian glass Bohemian glass, also referred to as Bohemia crystal, is glass produced in the regions of Bohemia and Silesia, now parts of the Czech Republic. It has a centuries long history of being internationally recognised for its high quality, craftsmanship, ...

was attacking the British market. The previous

excise duty file:Lincoln Beer Stamp 1871.JPG, upright=1.2, 1871 U.S. Revenue stamp for 1/6 barrel of beer. Brewers would receive the stamp sheets, cut them into individual stamps, cancel them, and paste them over the Bunghole, bung of the beer barrel so when ...

long charged on glass was abolished in 1845, which both encouraged the development of exciting new styles of decorating glass, and also made glass cheaper, leading to a flood of pressed glass imitations of cut glass style that tended to devalue the prestige of the style. Nonetheless, cut glass remained a staple in most prosperous British households, and was still widely exported. In the 1870s the "brilliant", "brilliant cut" or "American Brilliant" style emerged, perhaps first seen in America in glass exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centenary Exhibition: "its most complex brilliant cutting involved covering the glass surface with intersecting cuts that created innumerable, often fragmentary shapes making up larger patterns. Basic motifs used were stars, hobnail or polygonal diamonds, strawberry diamonds and fan scallops...".

Decline

The last decades of the 19th century saw exciting new developments in glass design, with much use of colour, the Victorian version of

using

glass etching Glass etching, or "French embossing", is a popular technique developed during the mid-1800s that is still widely used in both residential and commercial spaces today. Glass etching comprises the techniques of creating art on the surface of glass ...

opaline glass The term "opaline" refers to a number of different styles of glassware. By opaline glass we mean a milky glass, which can be white or colored, and is made translucent or opaque by adding particular phosphates or oxides during the mixing. It can ...

in France, and other innovations. Cut glass, especially in the brilliant style, did not mix well with these – the great majority of it has always used clear glass. An exception is the distinct Japanese style of

Satsuma kiriko is a style of cut glass, now a traditional Japanese craft. It was manufactured by the Satsuma clan from the final years of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Today, faithful reproductions are produced. History Sh ...

, which adds a thin layer of coloured

flashed glass Flashed glass, or flash glass, is a type of glass created by coating a colorless gather of glass with one or more thin layers of colored glass. This is done by placing a piece of melted glass of one color into another piece of melted glass of a dif ...

which is then cut through, giving a colour contrast. Similar effects were sometimes used in the West, especially in continental Europe. Cut glass vessels remained popular, but an increasingly conventional and conservative taste, little used for

art glass Art glass is a subset of glass art, this latter covering the whole range of art made from glass. Art glass normally refers only to pieces made since the mid-19th century, and typically to those purely made as sculpture or decorative art, with ...

, a new term for decorative glass with artistic aspirations. This was even more the case with

Art Nouveau glass Art Nouveau glass is fine glass in the Art Nouveau style. Typically the forms are undulating, sinuous and colorful art, usually inspired by natural forms. Pieces are generally larger than drinking glasses, and decorative rather than practical, oth ...

and that of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which both took on board Ruskin's criticisms, and preferred sinuous curving forms that emphasized the flowing, frozen liquid nature of glass. At the end of the century the market for expensive decorative glass appears to have slumped, perhaps because so much was now being made and traded internationally. Corning's cut glass industry peaked in 1905, when a directory recorded 490 cutters there, and 33 engravers, though the quality of some work was falling; by 1909 the number of cutters had fallen to 340. The arrival of

Modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

in the early 20th century did not do much to change this, and in 1923 an English expert complained that "to the aesthetic soul ut glassis still a thing accursed ... a striking testimony to the persistence of Ruskin's influence". He tried to do a survey of likely owners of 18th-century cut glass such as historic houses, Oxbridge colleges and London livery companies, but found very few would admit to owning any. But some glassmakers, for example in

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

, were sympathetic to linear and geometric decoration and made use of the technique, often as one of a number of techniques used in a single piece. This continues to be the case in the recent studio glass movement. In mid-20th-century England there was a revival in

, which was often accompanied by some cutting; the work of

Keith Murray Keith Omar Murray (born May 29, 1974) is an American rapper from New York. Murray grew up on Carleton Ave, in Central Islip, which is located on the South Shore of Long Island in Suffolk County. Murray was a known member of a local rap collec ...

includes examples. Traditional cut glass designs are still used, for example in what Americans call the

Old fashioned glass The old fashioned glass, otherwise known as the rocks glass and lowball glass (or simply lowball), is a short tumbler used for serving spirits, such as whisky, neat or with ice cubes ("on the rocks"). It is also normally used to serve certain ...

, a whisky or cocktail tumbler. In chandeliers, however, the clear cut glass style has been adapted successfully to modern styles and still holds its own, especially for large public spaces such as hotel lobbies.

Cut-glass accent

British English British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in ...

, a "cut-glass accent" is an especially clipped version of British upper-class

Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geog ...

, where "words are pronounced very clearly and carefully". The accent is agreed to be less common now than it was several decades ago, with even leading exponents such as Queen Elizabeth II having softened their pronunciation over the years.Robson, David
"Has the Queen become frightfully common?"
BBC website, 3 February 2016

Notes

References

* Battie, David and Cottle, Simon, eds., ''Sotheby's Concise Encyclopedia of Glass'', 1991, Conran Octopus, ISBN 1850296545 *Davison, Sandra and Newton, R.G., ''Conservation and Restoration of Glass'', 2008, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 9781136415517, 1136415513
google books
*Farr, Michael, ''Design in British Industry: A Mid-century Survey'', 1955, Cambridge University Press
google books
*"History"
"A History of the Chandelier"
*Osborne, Harold (ed), ''The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts'', 1975, OUP, * Powell, Harry J., ''Glass-making in England'', 1923, Cambridge University Press
google books
*Sinclaire, Estelle F., ''Complete Cut and Engraved Glass of Corning'' (New York State Series), 1997, Syracuse University Press
google books
*Sparke, Penny, "At the Margins of Modernism: The Cut – Crystal Object in the Twentieth Century", 1995, ''Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester'', 1995 , 77 ( 1 ) : 31–38
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