Is a showcase an element of the interior of a museum or a store? Features of the use of the word

Attractively designed showcase is often one of the main factors of successful sales in clothing stores, shoes, accessories and other products and consumer goods. It should cause the buyer a desire to go in, consider, purchase what you like. Marketers are building window dressing into a whole art. They study special techniques that will help to increase the demand and interest of the buyer to the product, thanks to its beautiful demonstration. “Showcase” - what is this word and what are the features of its use in colloquial and written speech? More on this later in detail.

The lexical meaning: "showcase"

The explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language give two basic meanings of the word. Consider them based on the original source. The New Dictionary of the Russian Language by T.F. Efremova gives the following descriptions.

1. The window of a store or other similar institution, specially equipped to demonstrate the goods sold or to advertise them.

Examples:

• "Showcases are traditionally made out in two ways: commodity or plot."
• "A successfully designed showcase should be associated with something desirable and joyful for a future buyer."

2. A glazed box, cabinet or stand with exhibits, announcements or samples that are intended for public viewing.

Examples:

• "Museum exhibits were neatly arranged in shop windows and seemed alive."
• "At the showcase, it was possible to take several brochures describing the technical characteristics of the sample."

Syntactic and morphological features

Showcase is a feminine noun, inanimate, 1st declension. Root: -withrin-; ending: a. According to the classification of A. A. Zaliznyak, it belongs to the type of declination 1a.

Singular:

Plural:

Origin

A showcase is a word that came from a French vitrine. Vitre - “window glass”, and further from it - vitrum - “glass”. The first references to the word can be found in the dictionaries of foreign words by M. Popov (1907), F. Pavlenkov (1907) and A.N. Chudinov (1910). After analyzing the release dates of the aforementioned publications, we can conclude that the "window" for more than a hundred years. During this time, in everyday life, she “overgrown” goals with a number of characteristics and stable phrases.

Synonyms

By the way, you can pick up the following variants of words that are similar in meaning in certain contexts. They are fully or partially able to convey the main connotation. These include: window, stand, cabinet, drawer, sign. The word "showcase", which means, first of all, a window with the goods on display, can also be correlated with the concept of "icon case" (this is a cabinet for icons), as well as with the "menu board" (a board with a written list of dishes in the menu of a catering establishment) .

Examples:

• "In the shop window, various accessories were fantastically arranged that would ideally fit the New Year's outfit."
• "In a glass stand located at the main entrance to the office, you could see your reflection and straighten your hair."
• "The box of goods sparkled like a Christmas tree, attracting attention and creating a festive mood."

Phraseologisms and stable phrases

In colloquial speech there is the expression "live as in a shop window." It means that a person has no secrets at all and allows others to observe themselves in everything, not only in actions, but also in thoughts, because a showcase is glass, a symbol of transparency and openness.

She may be:

• lighted, bright, sparkling, elegant, catchy, burning;
• shop, museum, pharmacy, jewelry, book;
• dirty, embossed, dusty, strange, dark, small, boarded up.

Showcase can:

• sparkle, hang, scatter, crack, burn, yawn, crumble, light up;
• rattle, reflect, see, look, cost, exhibit, tell, etc.

Examples:

• "The bookcase was bursting with new products and bestsellers that could be bought at half price due to holiday discounts."
• "The dusty museum display cases have not been seen for a long time by visitors, and the building itself has declined significantly over the past five years."
• "After eight in the evening, night windows are usually lit up, and then there is a desire to just walk and enjoy the cityscapes."

Most often the word is used in relation to refrigeration equipment, in the field of advertising, technology, economics, in general vocabulary. A showcase is what we see everywhere, going shopping or just looking at the products of modern manufacturers. In shops, shops, museums it is impossible to do without this detail of the decoration of the premises. It has become so familiar in everyday life that the analysis of the semantic properties of a concept makes you look at it from a new perspective. It is worth thinking about the richness of the Russian language on the examples of characteristics and descriptions of this word alone.