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English

A picture by Pere Borrell del Caso

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.
   • 1879, Richard Jefferies, The Amateur Poacher, chapterII:

     Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out. […]. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle served as a shaft.

   • 2012 March 1, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, in 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.
   • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

     My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

   • 1908, W[illiam] B[lair] M[orton] Ferguson, Zollenstein, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, OCLC 29686887 , chapter IV:

     So this was my future home, I thought! Certainly it made a brave picture. I had seen similar ones fired-in on many a Heidelberg stein. Backed by towering hills, […] a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.

   • 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.‎

   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 3, in The China Governess:

     Here the stripped panelling was warmly gold and the pictures, mostly of the English school, were mellow and gentle in the afternoon light.

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.‎

8. The art of painting; representation by painting.
   • Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)

     any well-expressed image […] either in picture or sculpture

9. A figure; a model.
   • James Howell (c.1594–1666)

     the young king's picture […] in virgin wax

10. Situation.

    The employment picture for the older middle class is not so good.

    You can just look at the election, you've got to look at the big picture.

Synonyms

• (representation as in the imagination): image

Derived terms

Translations

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.
   • 1967, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, released on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,

     Picture yourself on a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies,

3. (transitive) To depict.
   • 1898, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Watches

     I had never found him so impossible to soften or to move. I tried this way and I tried that; I pictured his future in an English gaol; I described the sorrow of his mother when I came back with the news; I said everything to touch his heart, but all to no purpose.

   • 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

Related terms

• depict
• depiction
• pictorial

Statistics

See also

• Wiktionary:Picture dictionary

Anagrams

• cuprite

Latin

Participle

pictūre

1. vocative masculine singular of pictūrus

Norman

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. (Guernsey) picture