Bench - Definition and Overview

Bench may refer to several things:

• A long backless seat, typically used for sitting at an outdoor table for casual eating.
• A very wide chair for seating multiple people, as might be seen in a park or on a porch.
• A place of work — a workbench consisting of an table and places to keep an arrangement of tools and materials. Jewler's benches my take stereotyped forms and arrangements depending upon the country of origin, hence an Italian bench, German bench, etc.
• The place where judges sit in a court, or metonymously a panel of judges or the office of a judge;
• The seats provided for Members in Parliament, used in various metonymous constructions such as back-bencher (a junior MP who sits on the back benches) and cross bench;
• The Bench language (Bench-non), spoken in southeastern Ethiopia.
• In surveying and civil engineering, a bench is a landform consisting of a long strip of land at constant height in an otherwise sloped area. It may be natural but usually refers to artificial earthworks (c.f. benchmark, q.v. berm).