Wiktionary

gloss

See also: gloss- and gloss.

English

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Pronunciation

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Etymology 1

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Probably from a North Germanic language, compare Icelandic glossi (“spark, flame”), glossa (“to flame”); or perhaps from dialectal Dutch gloos (“a glow, flare”), related to West Frisian gloeze (“a glow”), Middle Low German glȫsen (“to smoulder, glow”), German glosen (“to smoulder”); ultimately from Proto-Germanic *glus- (“to glow, shine”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰel- (“to flourish; be green or yellow”). More at glow.

Noun

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gloss (usually uncountable, plural glosses)

  1. A surface shine or luster.
    Synonyms: brilliance, gleam, luster, sheen, shine
  2. (figuratively) A superficially or deceptively attractive appearance.
    Synonyms: façade, front, veneer.
    • 1770, [Oliver] Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, a Poem, London: […] W[illiam] Griffin, […], →OCLC:
      To me more dear, congenial to my heart, / One native charm than all the gloss of art.
    • 2013 September 7, Daniel Taylor, “Danny Welbeck leads England's rout of Moldova but hit by Ukraine ban”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      Hodgson may now have to bring in James Milner on the left and, on that basis, a certain amount of gloss was taken off a night on which Welbeck scored twice but barely celebrated either before leaving the pitch angrily complaining to the Slovakian referee.
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Verb

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gloss (third-person singular simple present glosses, present participle glossing, simple past and past participle glossed)

  1. (transitive) To give a gloss or sheen to.
    Synonyms: polish, shine
  2. (transitive) To make (something) attractive by deception
    • 1722, Ambrose Philips, The Briton:
      You have the art to gloss the foulest cause.
  3. (intransitive) To become shiny.
  4. (transitive, idiomatic) Used in a phrasal verb: gloss over (“to cover up a mistake or crime, to treat something with less care than it deserves”).
Derived terms
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Translations
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Etymology 2

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Glosas Emilianenses, 11th c.

From Middle English glosse, glose, from Late Latin glōssa (“obsolete or foreign word requiring explanation”), from Ancient Greek γλῶσσα (glôssa, “language”). Doublet of glossa.

Noun

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gloss (plural glosses)

  1. (countable) A brief explanatory note or translation of a foreign, archaic, technical, difficult, complex, or uncommon expression, inserted after the original, in the margin of a document, or between lines of a text.
    Synonyms: gloze, annotation
    Hypernyms: explanation, note, marginalia
    • 1684, Samuel Butler, Hudibras:
      All this, without a gloss or comment, / He would unriddle in a moment.
    • 2021, Mary Wellesley, The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts, page 9:
      He was a prolific annotator - writing around fifty thousand glosses in as many as twenty manuscripts.
  2. (countable) Synonym of glossary, a collection of such notes.
  3. (countable, obsolete) An expression requiring such explanatory treatment.
  4. (countable) An extensive commentary on some text.
    Synonyms: commentary, discourse, discussion
  5. (countable, law, US) An interpretation by a court of a specific point within a statute or case law.
    • 1979, American Bar Foundation., Annotated code of professional responsibility, page ix:
      This volume is thus not a narrowly defined treatment of the Code of Professional Responsibility but rather represents a "common law" gloss on it.
    • 2007, Bruce R. Hopkins., The law of tax-exempt organizations., page 76:
      Judicial Gloss on Test [section title]
  6. (lexicography) A definition or explanation of a word sense.
    • 2007, Martin Rajman, Speech and Language Engineering, pages 244 text=For instance the concept {cat, true cat} has the following gloss: / "feline mammal usually having thick soft fur and being unable to roar".:
    • 2011, Gabriele Stein, “The linking of lemma to gloss in Elyot's Dictionary (1538)”, in Olga Timoleeva, Tanja Saily, editor, Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R. W. McConchie:
      Dictionary entries comprise two essential parts, the headword ('lemma') and the author's explanation ('gloss').
    • 2019, Jonathan Kline, A Proverb a Day in Biblical Hebrew, page xi:
      Therefore, for many of the Hebrew words in this book, I have provided more than one gloss (using a slash to separate alternatives, or double slashes when a single slash would be ambiguous), in order to give you a sense of the possible meanings of nuances […] .
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extensive commentary on some text

Etymology 3

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From Middle English glossen, glosen, from Old French gloser and Medieval Latin glossāre.

Verb

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gloss (third-person singular simple present glosses, present participle glossing, simple past and past participle glossed)

  1. (transitive) To add a gloss to (a text).
    Synonyms: annotate, mark up
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Further reading

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Anagrams

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Portuguese

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Etymology

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Unadapted borrowing from English (lip) gloss.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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gloss m (uncountable)

  1. lip gloss (cosmetic product)

Further reading

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