picture

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English

A picture by Pere Borrell del Caso

Etymology

From Middle English pycture, from Old French picture, from Latin pictūra (“the art of painting, a painting”), from pingō (“I paint”).

Pronunciation

Noun

picture (plural pictures)

  1. A representation of anything (as a person, a landscape, a building) upon canvas, paper, or other surface, by drawing, painting, printing, photography, etc.
    • 2012 March 1, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 106: 
      Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.
  2. An image; a representation as in the imagination.
    • 2007, The Workers' Republic
      Prior to seeing him and meeting him, and hearing him speak, I had conjured up a picture of him in my mind, which actual contact with him proved to be an illusion. I had conceived of him [...] as being tall, commanding, and as the advance notices of him, a sliver-tongued orator. I found him, however, to be the opposite of my mental picture; short, squat, unpretentious [...]
  3. A painting.
    There was a picture hanging above the fireplace.
  4. A photograph.
    I took a picture of the church.
  5. (informal) A motion picture.
    Casablanca is my all-time favorite picture.
  6. (dated, informal) ("the pictures") Cinema (as a form of entertainment)
    Let's go to the pictures.
  7. A paragon, a perfect example or specimen (of a category).
    She's the very picture of health.

Synonyms

  • (representation as in the imagination): image

Derived terms

Terms derived from picture (noun)

Translations

representation of visible reality produced by drawing, etc
painting — see painting
photograph
informal: cinema
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Verb

picture (third-person singular simple present pictures, present participle picturing, simple past and past participle pictured)

  1. (transitive) To represent in or with a picture.
    • 1966, Margaret Naumburg, Dynamically oriented art therapy, page 154:
      What is striking about the self portrait is that the patient had pictured herself as a much younger woman
    • 1962, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Pale Fire, page 130:
      while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut.
    • 1999, Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, grooves, and writing machines, page 107:
      Anyone "skilled in the art" could see from their language that Lemp and Wightman had not invented or patented the invention their draftsman had pictured.
  2. (transitive) To imagine or envision.
  3. (transitive) To depict.
    • 1985, Edmund Burke Feldman, Thinking about art‎, page 252:
      Drawing is picturing people, places, and things with line.
    • 1989, Jan Jelínek, The great art of the early Australians, page 490:
      Many rock paintings picture various species of fish.
    • 2004, Helen South, The everything drawing book, page 75:
      The sketch pictured here takes in the whole scene.

Translations

to make a picture of
to imagine or envision

Related terms

Statistics

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Guernésiais

Etymology

From Old French picture, from Latin pictūra (“the art of painting, a painting”), from pingō, pingere (“paint; decorate, embellish”), from Proto-Indo-European *peyḱ- (“spot, color”).

Noun

picture f (plural pictures)

  1. picture
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Last modified on 20 May 2013, at 17:39