dais

noun

1. A raised platform in a room for a high table, a seat of honour, a throne, or other dignified occupancy, such as ancestral statues; a similar platform supporting a lectern, pulpit, etc., which may be used to speak from.

   “Many of the figures, clad in mail from head to foot, were ranged above the dais; and she could almost fancy a skeleton form beneath, or that wild and fearful eyes glared through the apertures of the closed visors.”

   “At last we came to the head of the cave, where there was a rock daïs almost exactly similar to the one on which we had been so furiously attacked, a fact that proved to me that these daïs must have been used as altars, probably for the celebration of religious ceremonies, and more especially of rites connected with the interment of the dead. On either side of this daïs were passages leading, Billali informed me, to other caves full of dead bodies.”

   “Babbitt's party politely edged through them and into the whitewashed room, at the front of which was a dais with a red-plush throne and a pine altar painted watery blue, as used nightly by the Grand Masters and Supreme Potentates of innumerable lodges.”

   “A dais wife is a woman who sits at a round table with the wives of other men who are seated on the dais. Her husband sits on the dais, raised above the other people in the room, including his wife.”

   “The daises of the Northwest Colonnade and the South Temple of the Warriors, the Mercado benches, and the benches of the Southeast Patio of the Iglesia are other instances where large groups of individuals in processions are shown.”

2. (British, Northern, historical)A bench, a settle, a pew.

   “DAIS, Dess, Deas […] A long board, seat or bench erected against a wall. […] A pew in a church”

3. (obsolete)An elevated table in a hall at which important people were seated; a high table.

   “As the principal table was always placed upon a dais, it began very soon, by a natural abuse of words, to be called itself a Dais, and people were said to sit at the dais, instead of at the table upon the dais.”

4. The canopy over an altar, etc.
5. (form-of, plural)plural of Dai