pinnacle

Etymology

From Middle English, borrowed from Old French pinacle, pinnacle, from Late Latin pinnaculum (“a peak, pinnacle”), double diminutive of Latin pinna (“a pinnacle”); see pin. Doublet of panache.

noun

1. The highest point.
2. (geology) A tall, sharp and craggy rock or mountain.
   Coordinate term: sea stack
   Kings, who remain in many respects the representatives of a vanished world, solitary pinnacles that topple over the rising waste of waters under which the past lies buried. 1900, James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, volume 2, page 55
3. (figurative) An all-time high; a point of greatest achievement or success.
   The pinnacle of the effort to fix restrictive meanings to a set of terminology can be found in two papers in American Speech by Feinsilver (1979, 1980). 2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 7
4. (architecture) An upright member, generally ending in a small spire, used to finish a buttress, to constitute a part in a proportion, as where pinnacles flank a gable or spire.

verb

1. (transitive) To place on a pinnacle.
2. (transitive) To build or furnish with a pinnacle or pinnacles.
   The pediment of the Southern Transept is pinnacled, not inelegantly, with a flourished cross 1782, Thomas Warton, The History and Antiquities of Kiddington