Bench

Bench may refer to several things:

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• 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 piece of weight training equipment, often very similar to the above "wide backless chair": a bench (weight training).
• A verb meaning "to perform a bench press movement", usually using the above piece of weight training equipment.
• A place of work — a workbench consisting of a table and perhaps places to keep an arrangement of tools and materials. A bench upon which work of a specific nature may take place eg. a woodworking bench. Jewellers' benches may 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;
• In certain sports (especially basketball), resting players sit on the bench, and in common usage, to be "benched" means to be removed from a game.
• 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).
• Bench is also the name of a chain of retail clothing stores in the Philippines.