The vocabulary

Glossary

The words you meet on labels, in auction listings and in other collectors’ descriptions. Grouped by what you are actually looking at rather than alphabetically, because when you are starting out you can see the thing before you know its name. There is an A to Z below if you already have the word.

All 149 terms, A to Z

The pattern inside

The elements a maker builds a design from. Almost every word a beginner meets first belongs in this group.

Millefiori
Italian for “a thousand flowers”. The mosaic effect made by slicing bundled glass canes and setting the slices in clear glass. If you are looking at a weight filled with small coloured discs that read as tiny flowers, that is millefiori. More on millefiori.
Cane
A bundle of coloured glass rods fused together and drawn out long and thin. The pattern shrinks as it stretches but does not distort, so every slice across the cane carries the whole design. Canes are the raw material of millefiori, and finished ones are usually somewhere between three and six millimetres across.
Rod
A single length of solid glass, sometimes with a simple moulded shape running through its length. Rods are what canes are built from.
Murrine
The Venetian word for a sliced cane. It means much the same as millefiori; Venetian and studio glassmakers tend to say murrine, paperweight collectors tend to say millefiori.
Floret
A single cane slice that reads as one flower head rather than an abstract geometric pattern.
Silhouette cane
A cane whose cross-section shows a recognisable figure — a dancing man, a dog, a goat, a butterfly. Hard to make, and particular silhouettes are associated with particular factories, so they matter for attribution.
Signature cane
A small cane carrying a letter or initials that identify the factory or the maker, usually set at the centre of the design or tucked into its edge.
Date cane
The same idea carrying a year. A signature and a date cane together are the closest thing a paperweight has to a passport. More on identifying a weight.
Cog cane
A cane with a notched, gear-toothed outline, made by pressing the hot rod into a serrated mould.
Stardust cane
A cane packed with tiny star-shaped rods, which gives a speckled, glittering field.
Pastry mould cane
A cane that flares outward at its lower end like a fluted tin. The skirt is often visible from the side of the weight.
Latticinio
Threads of white or coloured glass laid in a regular criss-cross or spiral, used as a backdrop behind the motif. Also spelled latticino. From latte, milk.
Lace
Also called muslin, gauze or upset muslin. The same kind of threads, but tumbled at random rather than laid in a pattern, giving a soft cloudy white bed. The rough rule: latticinio is ordered, lace is not.
Filigree
A clear glass rod with white or coloured threads twisted through it. The building block of both lace and latticinio grounds.
Torsade
A thread wound around a core to make a rope-like ring, usually circling the base of a mushroom weight.
Ribbon
A flat band of coloured glass, often twisted, used in crown and swirl weights.
Lampwork
Glass shaped at a torch rather than at the furnace, which allows fine sculptural work — flowers, fruit, insects, snakes. A lampworked motif is built petal by petal and then picked up in clear glass.
Sulphide
A small ceramic medallion, usually a portrait in relief, sealed inside the glass. Also called a cameo incrustation. The silvery look is not metal: it comes from the way light behaves at the boundary between the ceramic and the glass around it.
Aventurine
Glass with metallic crystals suspended in it, usually copper, giving a dense glittering sparkle. Also called goldstone.

How the pattern is arranged

Two weights can use identical canes and look nothing alike. Most of these words describe the bed the design sits on, or the way the elements are spaced across it.

Ground
The bed the motif sits on. Several of the terms below are simply named kinds of ground. Sometimes called the cushion.
Clear ground
Plain clear glass behind the design, so the motif appears to float.
Colour ground
An opaque or translucent coloured layer behind the design.
Carpet ground
A whole field of one repeated cane, filling the weight like a carpet, often with a few contrasting canes set into it.
Jasper ground
A speckled bed made from finely ground glass in two colours.
Close packed millefiori
Canes crowded edge to edge with no space between them, filling the weight.
Concentric millefiori
Canes arranged in rings around a central cane.
Spaced millefiori
Canes set apart from one another with clear glass between, usually in loose circles.
Garland
Canes arranged in looping chains, sometimes separate, sometimes interlacing. A garland of three loops is a trefoil, five is a cinquefoil.
Scrambled
Offcuts and broken canes jumbled together to fill the weight. Often the least expensive antique weights, and a cheap way to get your eye in on cane types.
Mushroom
Canes gathered into an upright tuft that resembles a mushroom when seen from the side.
Bouquet
An arrangement of two or more lampworked flowers with leaves.
Nosegay
A flat bouquet that uses cane slices as the flower heads. Also called a posy.
Upright bouquet
A three-dimensional arrangement standing up in the glass rather than lying flat.
Crown weight
A hollow weight in which twisted bands radiate from a floret at the top, run down the sides and meet again near the base.
Swirl
Opaque coloured rods spiralling out from a central floret like a pinwheel.
Marbrie
Looped bands of colour drawn down the sides of the weight from the top, like a festoon.
Panel
A design divided into wedge-shaped sections, each with its own grouping of canes.

The shape and the base

Turn a weight over and most of what there is to learn about it is on the underside. These are the words for what you are holding.

Dome
The clear glass above the motif. It works as a lens, which is why a design looks larger and closer than it really is. Also called the crown.
Profile
The outline of the weight seen from the side. Makers and periods have characteristic profiles, so it is worth looking at a weight edge-on rather than only from above.
Base
The underside. Antique bases are usually slightly concave; a flat base can be original, but it can also be the result of grinding. More on reading the base.
Basal rim
The narrow ring around the edge of the base that the weight actually stands on. Where you will find most of the wear, and most of the chips.
Pontil mark
The rough scar left in the centre of the base where the weight was broken off the rod that held it. Sometimes left as it is, sometimes ground and polished away.
Pontil rod
The long solid iron rod a glassmaker uses to hold the piece while working it. Also called a punty.
Star cut
A many-pointed star ground into the base as decoration. Common, and often a sign the base was finished deliberately rather than simply flattened.
Strawberry cut
A grid of shallow cuts across the base. Variants with wider or deeper cuts are called waffle and hobnail.
Magnum
A weight measuring roughly three and a quarter inches across or more — about 83 mm.
Miniature
A weight of about two inches or less — roughly 51 mm.
Footed weight
A weight raised on its own pedestal foot. The French term is piedouche.
Hollow weight
A blown weight with a deliberate air cavity inside it, rather than a solid body of glass.
Dump
A heavy Victorian weight of dark green bottle glass, usually with air bubbles arranged as a flower or a pot of flowers, made in English bottle works. Sold as both paperweights and doorstops, and still one of the least expensive ways into antique glass.
Doorstop
A very large weight, made in quantity by English bottle works and by American glasshouses. English examples are usually the bottle-glass dumps above.

Cutting on the outside

Grinding flat surfaces into the dome changes how you see the design, and adds a second craft on top of the glassmaking.

Facet
A flat or concave surface ground into the outside of the weight. Faceting is the act of cutting them.
Printy
A round or oval window-like cut. American writers usually call it a punty, which is confusing, because that word also means the rod.
Window
A facet cut through a coloured overlay so you can see the motif underneath.
Table facet
A single flat circle ground across the top, which lets you look straight down into the design without the dome's magnification.
Thumbprint
An elongated oval concave cut.
Fluting
Deep narrow grooves, usually cut vertically around the sides.
Overlay
One or more layers of coloured glass applied over the whole weight and then cut through with windows. A double overlay has two.
Flash
A very thin wash of transparent colour, usually on the base. Thin enough that it can wear through, so check flashed bases for scuffing.
Clover cut
Intersecting printies forming a clover shape. A quatrefoil is the four-lobed version.
Diamond cut
A many-faceted criss-cross pattern, most often used on the base.

How glass is made

You do not need the workshop vocabulary to enjoy collecting, but it turns up constantly in descriptions, and a few of these words explain why a piece looks the way it does.

Batch
The raw recipe — sand plus fluxes, stabilisers and colouring oxides — melted together to make glass.
Metal
Glassmakers' own word for glass itself, especially while it is molten. Nothing to do with metals.
Gather
The blob of molten glass collected on the end of a rod or blowpipe.
Marver
The flat steel table the gather is rolled on to shape it and even out its heat. Originally marble, which is where the name comes from.
Blowpipe
A hollow steel tube used to inflate a gather into a bubble.
Gaffer
The lead glassmaker, who shapes the piece and directs the team working with them.
Glory hole
The small intensely hot opening used to reheat a piece as it is worked. Glass has to be kept hot enough to move.
Annealing
Cooling finished glass slowly and evenly so that internal stress is released. Glass that is cooled too fast carries that stress permanently and can crack days, or years, later.
Lehr
The long temperature-controlled oven a piece travels through while it anneals.
Cullet
Broken glass added back into the batch, which helps it melt.
Free-blown
Shaped entirely by breath, tools and gravity, without a mould.
Mould-blown
Blown into a mould, which fixes the shape and any pattern on the mould's inner surface.
Pressed glass
Made by pressing molten glass into a mould with a plunger. Fast and cheap, which is why so much Victorian and Depression-era glass is pressed.
Cut glass
Decorated after cooling by grinding facets, grooves and hollows with rotating wheels.
Frit
Crushed coloured glass rolled or melted onto a piece to add colour and pattern.

Kinds of glass

Names you will meet on labels and in listings, describing what the glass is rather than what was done to it. More on the main kinds of collectable glass.

Lead crystal
Glass with lead oxide in the batch. It is heavier, softer to cut, bends light more strongly, and rings when tapped. Also called flint glass.
Soda-lime glass
The ordinary everyday formula, used for most windows, bottles and tableware.
Borosilicate
Glass that tolerates sudden temperature change. The usual choice for torchwork and for laboratory ware.
Cased glass
Two or more layers of different coloured glass, one inside the other.
Cameo glass
Cased glass with the outer layer carved or acid-etched back so the design stands in relief against the colour beneath.
Flashed glass
A very thin outer colour layer, applied by dipping. Thinner than casing, and it can wear away.
Opaline
Dense translucent glass, traditionally opacified with bone ash and coloured in pale shades.
Milk glass
Opaque white glass resembling porcelain. The Italian term is lattimo.
Cranberry glass
Transparent pinkish-red glass, traditionally coloured with gold, which is part of why it was never cheap.
Uranium glass
Glass coloured with uranium oxide, which fluoresces bright green under ultraviolet light. That glow is the reliable test; colour alone is not.
Vaseline glass
In most collector usage, the pale yellow-green transparent kind of uranium glass, named for the petroleum jelly it resembles. Usage varies between countries, so check whether a seller means uranium content or simply a colour.
Iridescent glass
A rainbow sheen on the surface, like oil on water. It can be deliberate, produced with metallic vapours, or the result of centuries of burial.
Crackle glass
Made by plunging hot glass into water so the surface fractures, then reheating so the cracks are sealed and smoothed. Also called ice glass.

Condition, and what is wrong with it

Condition moves prices more than almost anything else, and the words are used precisely. Two of them — straw mark and striae — describe things that are not damage at all. More on what makes a weight valuable.

Fleabite
A tiny nick, roughly pinhead size. The smallest loss that still gets mentioned.
Flake
A small shallow chip that breaks the surface. Also called a nick.
Chip
A larger loss of glass, deep or wide enough to catch the eye immediately. Most often on the basal rim.
Crack
A break running into the body of the glass. Unlike a surface mark it does not stop at the skin, and it will not improve.
Hairline
A very tight narrow crack, easy to miss in a photograph and easy to feel with a fingernail.
Scratch
Surface damage that feels rough or sharp to a fingertip because the skin of the glass has been broken.
Straw mark
A thin curved line left on the surface during making, not damage. The test is touch: a crack catches a fingernail, a straw mark feels smooth.
Open bubble
A small crater where an air bubble reached the surface and burst during manufacture. A making fault rather than later damage.
Striae
Streaks of slightly different glass caught in the dome, giving a faint sugary or wavy look. Not damage, but it dulls the view of the design and collectors mark a weight down for it.
Sick glass
Chemical instability in the glass itself, caused by an unbalanced original recipe reacting with moisture over time. It shows as cloudiness, fine silvery cracks, or beads of moisture in humid weather. It is not dirt and it cannot be washed out.
Crizzling
The network of fine cracks that appears as sick glass progresses. A term worth knowing before you buy anything described as “cloudy but cleans up”.
Repolished
Reground to remove chips or scratches. It can look like an improvement, but it removes glass, alters the profile and the depth of the dome, and usually reduces value. Honest sellers disclose it.

What sellers say

Auction houses use a graded vocabulary of confidence, and the grades are not interchangeable. The exact wording belongs to each house and is printed in its own catalogue — read that — but the pattern below is consistent across the trade, and it descends from “we think it is” to “we think it is not”.

The maker's name alone
The strongest claim on the scale: in the house's opinion, the work of that maker.
Attributed to
Probably by that maker, in the house's opinion. A real step down from the name alone.
Circle of
By an unidentified hand working in that maker's style, during their lifetime.
Follower of
By an unidentified hand working in the style, at the time or a little after.
School of
Made in the period and in the style associated with that maker.
Manner of
In the style, but made later — though not recently.
Style of
In the style, and of recent making. In plain terms, a modern piece that looks like an old one.
After
A copy of a known original by someone else.
Signed
In the house's opinion the signature is the maker's own.
Bears signature
In the house's opinion the signature was added by someone else. The single most important phrase in this list — it looks reassuring and means close to the opposite.
Circa
Approximately, of a date. Usually taken to allow a few years either side.
Classic period
The French paperweight production of roughly 1845 to 1860, from Baccarat, Clichy and Saint Louis. When a description says “classic” it usually means this, not simply “old”.
Limited edition
A modern piece made in a stated, capped number. The cap is set by the maker and says nothing on its own about quality or later value.

The object itself

Away from paperweights, most of what a collector meets is a vessel, and the trade names its shapes precisely. These are the form words that turn up in listings, and the words for the parts of a piece you are asked to look at. More on starting with glass objects.

Posy vase
A small vase for a single bloom or a few short stems, usually under about 15cm. Also called a bud vase. Often made and sold in pairs.
Spill vase
A short, straight-sided vase made to hold spills — thin strips of wood or twisted paper used to carry a flame from the fire to a candle or a pipe. Usually a pair, and regularly sold today as small flower vases.
Celery vase
A tall footed vase for serving celery upright at table, a standard Victorian form in cut and pressed glass. Heavier and wider in the bowl than a flower vase of the same height.
Rose bowl
A squat bowl whose rim turns inward, so cut roses sit low and spread open. Some were sold with a wire or glass grid across the top to hold the stems.
Comport
A dish raised on a stem and foot, for fruit or sweets. British trade usage; American listings usually say compote. Some dealers reserve comport for covered examples, but the two words are used interchangeably far more often than not.
Tazza
A comport with a wide, shallow bowl — nearer a raised plate than a dish. The word is Italian and is used across glass, silver and ceramics alike.
Épergne
A table centrepiece built from a bowl with one or more trumpet-shaped vases rising out of it, sometimes with baskets hung from the arms. Victorian glass examples are often cranberry or vaseline with crimped rims. Pronounced “ay-pairn”.
Decanter
A stoppered bottle for serving wine or spirits. Age is read from the shape of the body, the number of rings around the neck and the form of the stopper.
Stopper
The ground plug of a decanter or scent bottle. Stoppers were ground to fit one bottle only, so a stopper that rattles, sits high or turns freely is usually a replacement from another piece.
Ewer
A jug with a lip and a handle, made for pouring water or wine. Ewer implies the taller, more formal shape; jug is the everyday word for the same thing.
Goblet
A drinking glass with the bowl raised on a stem and foot. The shape of the bowl, the stem and any knop are what date it.
Bonbon dish
A small shallow dish for sweets, sometimes on a short foot. Sweetmeat is the older word for the same thing and usually implies a stemmed version.
Scent bottle
A small bottle for perfume, closed with a ground stopper or a metal screw top. Often cut, cased or enamelled far beyond what its size would suggest, because it was made to be given.
Free-form
A shape blown and tooled without a mould and without symmetry, so no two pieces are identical. Common in mid-century Murano and in Scandinavian and British studio glass.
Rim
The edge of an opening, described by what it does: everted turns outward, incurved turns in, crimped or frilled has been tooled into waves.
Collar
A separate ring of glass applied around a neck, sometimes as a decorative band, sometimes to thicken and protect the rim.
Stem
The narrow section between bowl and foot on a goblet, comport or candlestick. A drawn stem is pulled from the bowl itself; an applied stem is added as a separate gather.
Knop
A swelling in a stem, plain or moulded. The number, placement and shape of the knops are among the more reliable dating features on stemware.
The base a piece stands on. A folded foot has its edge turned under to give a doubled rim that chips less, and is an early feature. A pontil mark underneath is normal, not damage.

Decorating the surface

Decoration is either hot, worked into the glass while it is still soft, or cold, cut and bitten into the surface after annealing. The difference matters to a buyer: hot decoration is part of the body and cannot be removed, while cold decoration sits on the skin and can wear, chip or be added later.

Trailing
A thread of hot glass laid onto a piece by hand and tooled while soft. Trails are slightly irregular, and that irregularity is the evidence of hand work.
Threading
Fine, closely spaced threads wound onto a body with a machine, regular in a way hand trailing never is. W. J. Hodgetts of Stourbridge patented the threading machine in 1876, so mechanically even threading places a piece at that date or later.
Applied decoration
Any element added as a separate gather of hot glass — handles, feet, leaves, flowers, or the ruffled bands called rigaree. It fuses to the body, so it cannot be removed without leaving a scar.
Prunt
A blob of applied glass, left plain, drawn to a point, or stamped into a raspberry. Originally a grip for greasy fingers on a drinking glass, later kept purely for decoration.
Pincered
Hot glass squeezed with tools into ridges, frills or a wavy edge. The frilled rims on Victorian épergnes and vaseline baskets are pincered, or crimped, work.
Enamelling
Coloured glass powder painted on and fixed by refiring, so the colour stands very slightly proud and will not scratch off. Cold-painted decoration, applied without refiring, wears away with handling — a real difference in value.
Gilding
Gold applied to the surface, either fired on or laid on cold. It goes first at the rim and on the high points, which is where to look before believing a piece is untouched.
Acid etching
A design bitten into the surface with hydrofluoric acid through a resist, leaving matte pattern against polished glass. Fast and repeatable, so it is common on factory glass.
Acid cut-back
Acid etching taken down through one or more cased layers, so the colour beneath is exposed and the design is left standing in relief. Distinct from cameo glass, which is cut back by wheel, though many pieces use acid for the rough work and a wheel for the detail.
Wheel engraving
A design cut with rotating copper wheels and an abrasive. The cut is matte, its depth varies across the design, and under a lens the separate strokes can be seen.
Diamond-point engraving
Scratched freehand with a diamond-tipped stylus, giving a fine, light line. The same tool is used for stipple engraving, where the whole image is built from dots.
Sandblasting
Abrasive driven at the surface through a stencil, leaving an even, slightly grainy matte finish. A modern method, and the usual way a satin or frosted surface is produced.
Combing
Trails applied and then dragged with a hook while still hot, pulling them into festoons or waves. The trails finish flush with the body rather than standing proud of it.
Pulled feather
The most familiar combed pattern, a repeating feather or loop drawn up the body. Iridised Art Nouveau versions are what most people picture at the name.
Controlled bubbles
Bubbles placed deliberately, usually by pressing a gather onto spikes and then casing it in clear glass so the hollows are sealed in a regular grid. Random bubbles are a fault; a pattern of them is the point.
Mica
Metallic flecks suspended in the glass or trapped under a clear casing, giving a loose glitter quite unlike the dense, even sparkle of aventurine.
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