rotunda

name

1. The United States Capitol rotunda.

   “No African-Americans have lain in state in the Rotunda, and only two have lain there in honor: Mrs. Parks in 2005 and Officer Jacob Joseph Chestnut, a Capitol Police officer killed in the line of duty, in 1998.”

noun

Etymology: Learned borrowing from Latin rotunda, from rotundus (“round”). In the architectural sense, from Sancta Maria Rotunda (the name for a church in the Pantheon).

1. A round building, usually small, often with a dome.

   “The rotunda begun but never completed by Abbot Wulfric (1047–59) at St Augustine’s Abbey as a link between the church of St Mary and that of St Peter and St Paul is an unusual and ambitious example of mid-eleventh-century English architecture which partly survives (fig. 4.6, top). […] Many of these rotundae are known to have had a special funerary function (as was the case at Canterbury).”

   “The purely Greek character of the temple is revealed in the fact that there is no portico aligning the structure; Roman tholoi and rotundae are usually distinguished by a portico.”

2. A Gothic typeface used in early printed books in Northern Italy, based on a rounded script developed in the 13th cent.; the manuscript hand on which this typeface was based.
3. Alternative spelling of rotonda.

   “TPLEX Rotunda is a roundabout located in Rosario, La Union.”

4. A form of cupola that has pentagons rather than squares or rectangles.