phrase-requestword-request
Is there something like 'canvas tent' (translation for Polish 'płachta namiotowa' suggested by Google Translate), or this has some other name?
This is what I mean:
It's not a tent, it can be considered outside part of small tent, but is used mostly as emergence (because it's very light, compared to ten) and by survivalists.
How is something like that called? The search 'canvas tent' returns the pictures of tents in Google, so I think this thing has some other name…
The image depicts a "height ruler." To be more precise, it is a wall-mounted height ruler. Friendly decoration on a height ruler is common in a pediatric (kids) doctor's office. The photo shows a person taking the height measurement of a child.
A "height chart" is group of data points (height) taken over time and plotted on a chart or graph. Many families will make a chart of their children's growth by marking a door frame with a pencil and making note of the individual child's initials and the date.
Of course there is no reason that a person cannot use the depicted ruler as a chart as well by recording the height on the ruler. There is no way to tell if this is happening in the photo, but I don't see a writing implement in the man's hand.
Preface ADDED 14 Jan/Jan 14, 00:11 GMT/UTC: This answer, as the OP Lucian Sava is well aware, has been written from an AmE perspective. Actually, it is written from the perspective of the variety of AmE that I speak. I think Lucian gets by now that English usage is not universal, as I had already indicted in my anwer. Let the conversation continue, by all means!
Serpentine is fine, but in English I am pretty sure we would use it as an adjective describing the road. Such a road is also called, in familiar terms, a curvy mountain road. More technically, it is any road that contains many switchbacks or hairpin curves
Switchback can refer to entirety of such a road. But this may not reflect universal usage.
I think serpentine (adjective) would be the more universally recognized word.
You can do an image search for both "switchback road" and "serpentine road" and get many of the same images.
Thus saith the snake:
Best Answer
Shelter-half, rain fly, and leanto (or lean-to) are three terms sometimes used as names of a structure as in your picture. Scattered among images on the google-images pages (1,2,3) are some pictures like yours, although for the third term images like yours are infrequent. Also see tarp, tarp tent, and tarpaulin.
Among people who camp in the US, fly or rain fly is the accepted term for the outer layer of a tent-and-fly combination, where the fly serves as a rain shield or additional thermal barrier for the tent. Most multi-season camping tents come with a fly or offer one as an option. Flies for tents typically are shaped to roughly match a given tent (ie are not flat) and are sewn together from pieces of thin nylon fabric, often waterproofed. A tent and fly can be used in several combinations: the tent alone, in mild dry weather; the fly alone, as a quickly-set-up rain or sun or sleeping shelter; or in more-severe weather, used together, with the fly keeping the tent drier and warmer than it would otherwise be.
A tarp, on the other hand, may be made of canvas, nylon, or various combination fabrics (such as rubberized or plasticized nylon). Tarps typically are flat fabric, with grommets along the hems. A shelter-half is a particular kind of fly, such that two shelter-halves together can make up an enclosed tent. Shelter-halves have been common items in surplus stores after various wars, and while (in my opinion) they are practically obsolete, the term shelter-half lives on.