The word "lintel" is correct and usable in written English.
It refers to a horizontal support beam placed over a door or window. Example: "The architect designed a beautiful stone lintel to enhance the entrance of the building." Alternatives include "beam" or "header."
The opening above the lintel is flanked by seated figures, while the lintel itself is carved on its underside with figures of a goddess and of animals.
The enormous monolithic lintel of the doorway weighs 120 tons and is 29.5 feet (9 metres) long, 16.5 feet (5 metres) deep, and 3 feet (0.9 metre) high.
The posts must support the lintel and its loads without crushing or buckling.
Stone has this property and is more versatile in its use as a post than as a lintel.
The post and lintel were not fundamentally altered until the production of cast-iron columns, which were stronger yet smaller in circumference, thus greatly reducing the mass and weight of buildings.
The job of the lintel is to bear the loads that rest on it (and its own load) without deforming or breaking.
As a prehistoric stone circle, it is unique because of its artificially shaped sarsen stones (blocks of Cenozoic silcrete), arranged in post-and-lintel formation, and because of the remote origin of its smaller bluestones (igneous and other rocks) from 100 150 miles (160 240 km) away, in South Wales.
Much modern construction in steel and concrete is based on the post-and-lintel system, restoring the formal simplicity of the oldest structures to modern architecture.
Such ancient structures as Stonehenge, in Britain, were constructed on the post-and-lintel system, which was the basis of architecture from prehistoric to Roman times.
But, in its pure form, the post-and-lintel is seen only in colonnades and in framed structures, since the posts of doors, windows, ceilings, and roofs are part of the wall.
Much construction in modern materials is based on the post-and-lintel system of the past.
