Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Designating color perceived to have zero saturation and therefore no hue, such as neutral grays, white, or black.
- adj. Refracting light without spectral color separation.
- adj. Biology Difficult to stain with standard dyes. Used in reference to cells or tissues.
- adj. Music Having only the diatonic tones of the scale.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Destitute of color; free from coloration; transmitting light without decomposing it into its constituent colors: as, an achromatic lens or telescope.
- In biology: Colorless; hyaline. Difficult to stain: a term applied to the portion of the cell-nucleus which exhibits little or no tendency to stain in carmine, hæmatoxylin, or certain aniline dyes used in histologic and cytologic technic.
Wiktionary
- adj. optics Free from color; transmitting light without color-related distortion.
- adj. Containing components such as achromatic lenses and prisms, designed to prevent color-related distortion.
- adj. biology Uncolored; not absorbing color from a fluid; -- said of tissue
- adj. music Having only the diatonic notes of the scale; not modified by accidentals.
- adj. Being achromatic in subject
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. (Opt.) Free from color; transmitting light without decomposing it into its primary colors.
- adj. (Biol.) Uncolored; not absorbing color from a fluid; -- said of tissue.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. having no hue
Etymologies
- Ancient Greek ἀχρωμάτιστος (akhrōmatistos, "uncolored"), from ἀ- (a-, "alpha privative") + χρῶμα (khrōma, "color"); compare French achromatique (Wiktionary)
- From Greek akhrōmatos : a-, without; see a-1 + khrōma, khrōmat-, color. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“This might not necessarily be a real appearance for it is conceivable that such traces of colour might be due to the telescopes employed not having been truly achromatic, that is, not sufficiently corrected for colour; but making every allowance for this possible source of mistake there yet remains proof that the colour which has often been seen has been real.”
“In a refracting telescope we have to employ what is known as the achromatic combination, consisting of one lens of flint glass and one of crown glass, adjusted to suit each other with extreme care.”
“Of course the presence of either of these defects is certainly and correctly indicated by the appearance of one or the other of the colors, under certain circumstances; but the simple visibility of prismatic color is by no means a reliable indication of over or under correction of color, and, indeed, to the honor of our opticians, it may be stated that very few objectives are made that cannot justly be called achromatic in the general sense of the term.”
“Although with the increase in power it is correspondingly difficult to combine all these corrections in one objective, they are brought to a high pitch of excellence in the present-day "achromatic" objectives, and so remove the necessity for the use of the higher priced and less durable apochromatic lenses.”
“Her achromatic breasts sway freely inside the full halter and I see her hips dance, suggesting that I do something.”
“Also, belated greetings to achromatic, and Hippo Birdie Dates to Marilee!”
“While designing the achromatic objective lens for a telescope, he saw the spectrum of sunlight as it passed through a thin slit and the dark emission lines.”
Weekend SkyWatcher's Forecast: March 5-7, 2010 | Universe Today
“His achromatic objective lens is still used in modern telescopes.”
Weekend SkyWatcher's Forecast: March 5-7, 2010 | Universe Today
“A nation's institutional memory is invariably simplistic and achromatic, with good guys in white hats and bad guys in black.”
Phillip Martin: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and the Need to Readjust Our Historical Lenses
“Dictionary. com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This a-6 var. of an - 1 before a consonant, meaning “not,” “without”: amoral; atonal; achromatic.”
North Carolina Senate Race Degenerates Into Shouting Match About Atheists
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘achromatic’.
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Writing Power
Words I am gathering from my reading
beetling, beetle, achromatic, tern, skink, treacly, venerable, skald, benthic, isle, capricious, sinew and 8 more...
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color, light & sight
albedo, chromatography, chromatic, tone, penumbra, superluminal, diaphanous, iridescent, amethyst, opalescent, celadon, lapis and 35 more...
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5000 FREE SAT Words
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 229 more...
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The Aubrey/Maturin List I'm Gonna Mak...
I'm wading through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels one by one, and someday, I'll wade through them again and list all the words I learned while reading them.
Edit: I started ma...studdingsail, carronade, mumchance, grumlin-futtocks, crosscat-harpings, holystone, sennit, orlop, orchitis, negus, kevel, altumal and 1112 more...
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GRE
Taisha GRE Bible
archaic, archetype, archipelago, architect, archive, arctic, ardor, arduous, argot, arid, armory, arrest and 289 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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circumscribe
silty, lettuce, ingratiate, circumscribe, defection, fastidious, indolently, mitigate, inwardness, twined, deference, mottled and 100 more...
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jimmynewland's Words
steganography, incunabulum, dog days, geekhood, risorgimento, ab initio, slugabed, humanism, diddly-squat, doch-an-dorris, snickersnee, rictus and 198 more...
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fbharjo's Words
jumelle, kef, kenspeckle, lautitious, essentic, pilpulistic, impavid, cicurant, clou, chrysostomic, miasma, teleology and 1625 more...
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Digital Photography
red-eye, center-weighted, matrix metering, cmos sensor, burst mode, slow synchro, rear-curtain sync, forced flash, strobes, pre-strobe, hot shoe, fill flash and 102 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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Word-O-Matic
achromatic, apochromatic, aromatic, asymptomatic, automatic, axiomatic, chromatic, dichromatic, diplomatic, extrasomatic, heterochromatic, homochromatic and 16 more...
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Cpuls's Words
a fortiori, abderian, abecedarian, ablate, abnegation, abnormous, abrade, abscess, abut, accimus, acclivity, accouchement and 18 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for achromatic.
Socrates “Knotted at her throat she wore a lilac scarf that even in the achromatic sunshine cast its color up to her face and down around her moving feet in a lilac shadow.”
TENDER IS THE NIGHT Feb 24, 2013
chained_bear "'...I shall keep in as close with the shore as can be, and you shall look at the creatures with my best achromatic glass,'—reaching for a splendid five-lens Dollond, an instrument that Stephen was never allowed to use, because of his tendency to drop telescopes into the sea."
--Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World, 277 Feb 23, 2008