Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Spotted or blotched with different shades or colors.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Spotted; variegated; marked with blotches of color, of unequal intensity, passing insensibly into one another.
- Specifically
- In entomology, marked with irregular spots, generally formed of hairs of a different color from the ground; having two or more colors irregularly mingled in spots, but not running into one another.
- In metallurgy, an epithet noting the appearance of pig-iron when in a stage intermediate between the stages designated as the white and the gray.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Marked with spots of different colors; variegated; spotted.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Colored in patches; spotted
- verb simple past of
mottle
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective having spots or patches of color
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Under his feet was the velvet grass, the trees arched overhead, and he stood in mottled sunshine.
CREATED HE THEM 2010
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Her bright russet hair sliding out of a barrette, her skin mottled, her face carefully neutral.
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Under his feet was the velvet grass, the trees arched overhead, and he stood in mottled sunshine.
Created He Them 1911
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"Toasted skin syndrome" is what Swiss researchers have dubbed a mottled-skin condition caused by long-term heat exposure.
Toasted skin syndrome: Laptops burning skin Melissa Bell 2010
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The hemp, nutmeg and sage colors are kind of mottled while the others are solid.
PAPERSTONE & RICHLITE: From Countertop to Half Pipe! | Inhabitat 2006
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The Superman symbols turn this kind of mottled, leprous purple, and the milk turns a lovely shade of blue, just like Aunt Beru used to make.
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But we can always find some other expert who disagrees -- my own take would be that there are probably real shadows in some pix that exhibit similar "mottled" behavior.
Posthuman Blues Mac 2007
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The Superman symbols turn this kind of mottled, leprous purple, and the milk turns a lovely shade of blue, just like Aunt Beru used to make.
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The last of the camellias are fading, three in a row: a candy pink smaller flower, a large mid-crimson and a large deeper red with a kind of mottled pattern.
Archive 2004-10-01 2004
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The last of the camellias are fading, three in a row: a candy pink smaller flower, a large mid-crimson and a large deeper red with a kind of mottled pattern.
JTroyer commented on the word mottled
"-in the mottled patterns of their battered torso..." Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
October 17, 2010