Library / English Dictionary

MOTTLE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

An irregular arrangement of patches of color

Example:

it was not dull grey as distance had suggested, but a mottle of khaki and black and olive-green

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("mottle" is a kind of...):

color; coloring; colour; colouring (a visual attribute of things that results from the light they emit or transmit or reflect)

 II. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Colour with streaks or blotches of different shades

Synonyms:

cloud; dapple; mottle

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Hypernyms (to "mottle" is one way to...):

spot (mark with a spot or spots so as to allow easy recognition)

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "mottle"):

harlequin (variegate with spots or marks)

speckle; stipple (produce a mottled effect)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s something
Something ----s something

Derivation:

mottling (the act of coloring with areas of different shades)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Mark with spots or blotches of different color or shades of color as if stained

Synonyms:

blotch; mottle; streak

Classified under:

Verbs of sewing, baking, painting, performing

Hypernyms (to "mottle" is one way to...):

color; color in; colorise; colorize; colour; colour in; colourise; colourize (add color to)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

Derivation:

mottling (the act of coloring with areas of different shades)

Credits

 Context examples: 

Finally one of them, an elderly man, with a necklace and bracelet of great lustrous glass beads and the skin of some beautiful mottled amber-colored animal slung over his shoulders, ran forward and embraced most tenderly the youth whom we had saved.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

From Dax to St. Jean Pied-du-Port the country was mottled with the white tents of Gascons, Aquitanians and English, all eager for the advance.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“A child would know Silver Blaze, with his white forehead and his mottled off-foreleg.”

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He spun round with a scream and fell upon his back, his hideous red face turning suddenly to a dreadful mottled pallor.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Strings of pedestrians, most of them so weary and dust-covered that it was evident that they had walked the thirty miles from London during the night, were plodding along by the sides of the road or trailing over the long mottled slopes of the moorland.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Cutting diagonally across the mottled plans is the long extensional fault of Inanna Fossa, which stretches eastward 370 miles (600 kilometers) from here to the western edge of the great nitrogen ice plains of Sputnik Planum.

(What’s Eating at Pluto?, NASA)

The whole face of the country was scarred and disfigured, mottled over with the black blotches of burned farm-steadings, and the gray, gaunt gable-ends of what had been chateaux.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

So for five long minutes the gallant horsemen of Spain and of France strove ever and again to force a passage, until the wailing note of a bugle called them back, and they rode slowly out of bow-shot, leaving their best and their bravest in the ghastly, blood-mottled heap behind them.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Down in the courtyard half-clad wretches, their bare limbs all mottled with blood-stains, strutted about with plumed helmets upon their heads, or with the Lady Rochefort's silken gowns girt round their loins and trailing on the ground behind them.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)