DICT.TW Dictionary Taiwan

 Stage n.
 1. A floor or story of a house. [Obs.]
 2. An elevated platform on which an orator may speak, a play be performed, an exhibition be presented, or the like.
 3. A floor elevated for the convenience of mechanical work, or the like; a scaffold; a staging.
 4. A platform, often floating, serving as a kind of wharf.
 5. The floor for scenic performances; hence, the theater; the playhouse; hence, also, the profession of representing dramatic compositions; the drama, as acted or exhibited.
    Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage.   --Pope.
 Lo! where the stage, the poor, degraded stage,
 Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age.   --C. Sprague.
 6. A place where anything is publicly exhibited; the scene of any noted action or career; the spot where any remarkable affair occurs; as, politicians must live their lives on the public stage.
 When we are born, we cry that we are come
 To this great stage of fools.   --Shak.
 Music and ethereal mirth
 Wherewith the stage of air and earth did ring.   --Miton.
 7. The platform of a microscope, upon which an object is placed to be viewed. See Illust. of Microscope.
 8. A place of rest on a regularly traveled road; a stage house; a station; a place appointed for a relay of horses.
 9. A degree of advancement in a journey; one of several portions into which a road or course is marked off; the distance between two places of rest on a road; as, a stage of ten miles.
    A stage . . . signifies a certain distance on a road.   --Jeffrey.
    He traveled by gig, with his wife, his favorite horse performing the journey by easy stages.   --Smiles.
 10. A degree of advancement in any pursuit, or of progress toward an end or result.
    Such a polity is suited only to a particular stage in the progress of society.   --Macaulay.
 11. A large vehicle running from station to station for the accommodation of the public; a stagecoach; an omnibus. “A parcel sent you by the stage.”   [Obsolescent]
    I went in the sixpenny stage.   --Swift.
 12. Biol. One of several marked phases or periods in the development and growth of many animals and plants; as, the larval stage; pupa stage; zoea stage.
 Stage box, a box close to the stage in a theater.
 Stage carriage, a stagecoach.
 Stage door, the actors' and workmen's entrance to a theater.
 Stage lights, the lights by which the stage in a theater is illuminated.
 Stage micrometer, a graduated device applied to the stage of a microscope for measuring the size of an object.
 Stage wagon, a wagon which runs between two places for conveying passengers or goods.
 Stage whisper, a loud whisper, as by an actor in a theater, supposed, for dramatic effect, to be unheard by one or more of his fellow actors, yet audible to the audience; an aside.