We explain what a threshold is, its meaning in architecture, as a limit, as a minimum level and its multiple meanings.
What is a threshold?
The word threshold has very different meanings in Spanish, especially related to the spatial and to the limits. In general, thresholds are the step, entry, or limit that indicates the beginning of something. To enter a room, for example, we must cross the threshold of the door, that is, the space that the door normally occupies and that marks the end of one environment and the beginning of another.
The word threshold comes from the Latin limitis, "Limit" or "extreme", a voice used to refer to the term of a house or building. The original term in Spanish was lumbral, since it is linked to the fire, that is, to the fire, the so-called "heat of the hearth". With use and modifications phonetic, the word lost its initial letter, due to the superposition of the consonant «l» in “el lumbral”. So it ended up as a threshold.
In architecture the threshold is the beam that supports the wall above an entrance, acting as a lintel or architrave. In other words, let's imagine two timbers or structures acting as columns or pillars, on which one is placed horizontally (the lintel): that rectangular empty space through which we can enter the room is precisely the threshold.
However, the word threshold is used metaphorically for many other areas of knowledge and life, always with its sense of the starting point of something, or the minimum point of something. Some examples of this below:
- The submarine threshold is a deep point of the topography underwater that marks the end of one underwater basin and the beginning of another.
- The pain threshold is the lowest point of intensity at which a stimulus is registered by the human body as pain. This threshold may vary depending on the person, and the "lower" it is, the more easily a person will register a stimulus as painful, that is, the more pain they will feel more often.
- The threshold of the perception It is the minimum level that a signal must have in order to be registered and recognized by a system, be it computerized, physical or the human body itself. For example, the threshold of hearing is the minimum amount of sound that the human body is capable of naturally registering.
- The threshold of the poverty o poverty line is the level of income minimum financial requirements that a person requires to satisfy their minimum needs and not be in a situation of poverty. This threshold is defined according to different variables and it can be very different from country to country.
- The threshold of cost effectiveness, equilibrium point or “dead point” is the minimum number of goods that a commercial organization must sell to be able to match the production costs and the income from sale, that is, so that the profit is zero. At that point, there are no income, and no losses.
- The electoral threshold or electoral floor is, in politics, the minimum proportion of votes that a candidate or an electoral list requires to be taken into account in the distribution of seats or seats in parliament or in the corresponding legislative entity. In other words, the minimum number of votes to be considered an active political force.