stipple

English

Noun

stipple (countable and uncountable, plural stipples)

1. The use of small dots that give the appearance of shading; the dots thus used.
   • 1877, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”, in Robert Bridges, editor, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Now First Published […], London: Humphrey Milford, published 1918, →OCLC, page 30, lines 1–3:

     Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim: […]

Translations

the use of small dots that give the appearance of shading

• German: Tüpfelung f, Punktierung f, Kornrasterung f, Sprenkelung f
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}

Verb

1. (transitive) To use small dots to give the appearance of shading to.
   • c. 1760, Oliver Goldsmith, The citizen of the world: or, letters from a Chinese philosopher, residing in London, to his friends in the east, Letter 48,[1]

     Don’t you think, Major Vampyre, that eye-brow stippled very prettily?

   • 1851, John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, New York: John Wiley, p. 50,^[2]

     The worst drawings that have ever come from [ Turner’s] hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast […]

   • 1922, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter 41,^[3]

     There were no footmarks on the ground, for each wind swept like a great brush over the sand surface, stippling the traces of the last travellers till the surface was again a pattern of innumerable tiny virgin waves.

   • 1922, Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, Chapter 10,^[4]

     Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of infrequent mysterious lights.

   • 1966, “Charisma, Calluses and Cash,” Time, 14 October, 1966,^[5]

     The biennial profusion of campaign billboards and posters stipples the land that Lady Bird wants to beautify and Lyndon yearns to own.

   • 1988, Edmund White, The Beautiful Room is Empty, New York: Vintage International, 1994, Chapter Five,

     Although he was clean-shaven, black Benday dots traced the narrow pathway of his thin mustache and the stippled edge of his jaw.

Translations

to use small dots to give the appearance of shading to

• German: tüpfeln (de), sprenkeln (de)
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}

Anagrams

• Tipples, tipples