Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A hard rough lump growing on the skin, caused by infection with certain viruses and occurring typically on the hands or feet.
  • noun A similar growth or protuberance, as on a plant.
  • noun A genital wart.
  • noun One that resembles or is likened to a wart, especially in unattractiveness or smallness.
  • noun An imperfection; a flaw.
  • idiom (warts and all) All defects and imperfections notwithstanding.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A small circumscribed elevation on the skin, usually with an uneven papillary surface and a broad base, caused by a localized overgrowth of the papillæ and epidermis; verruca; hence, a similar natural excrescence of the skin.
  • noun In farriery, a spongy excrescence on the pastern of the horse.
  • noun In botany, a firm glan dular or gland-like excrescence on the surface of a plant.
  • noun In entomology, a small obtuse, rounded, or flattened elevation of a surface, often of a distinct color from the rest of the part: used principally in describing larvæ.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Med.) A small, usually hard, tumor on the skin formed by enlargement of its vascular papillæ, and thickening of the epidermis which covers them.
  • noun An excrescence or protuberance more or less resembling a true wart; specifically (Bot.), a glandular excrescence or hardened protuberance on plants.
  • noun (Med.) a soft, bright red, pointed or tufted tumor found about the genitals, often massed into groups of large size. It is a variety of condyloma. Called also pointed wart, venereal wart.
  • noun (Bot.) the swine's cress. See under Swine.
  • noun (Zoöl.) any one of several species of East Indian colubrine snakes of the genus Acrochordus, having the body covered with wartlike tubercles or spinose scales, and lacking cephalic plates and ventral scutes.
  • noun (Bot.) a kind of wartwort (Euphorbia Helioscopia).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun pathology A type of deformed growth occurring on the skin caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV).
  • noun Any similar growth occurring in plants or animals, such as the parotoid glands in the back of toads.
  • noun computing, programming, slang, derogatory Any of the prefixes used in Hungarian notation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an imperfection in someone or something that is suggestive of a wart (especially in smallness or unattractiveness)
  • noun any small rounded protuberance (as on certain plants or animals)
  • noun (pathology) a firm abnormal elevated blemish on the skin; caused by a virus

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English wearte.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English wearte, from Proto-Germanic *wartōn. Cognate with Dutch wrat, German Warze, Swedish vårta.

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Examples

Comments

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  • There's a wart on a frog on a bump on a log in a hole at the bottom of the sea.

    July 9, 2008