Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A water-soluble, yellowish-brown pigment.
- n. A grayish to yellowish brown.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In painting, a brown pigment extracted from the soot of wood. To prepare it, soot (that of beech is the best) is put into water in the proportion of two pounds to a gallon, and boiled half an hour; after standing to settle, and while hot, the clearer part of the fluid must be poured off to remove the salts, and the sediment (which is bister) evaporated to dryness. It has been much used as a watercolor, particularly by the old masters, for tinting drawings and shading sketches, before India ink came into general use for such work. In oil it dries very slowly.
- Of the color of bister; blackish-brown.
Wiktionary
- n. alternative spelling of bistre.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Paint.) A dark brown pigment extracted from the soot of wood.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a water-soluble brownish-yellow pigment made by boiling wood soot
Etymologies
- French bistre. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“( "bister") and Cogenhoe ( "cook-no"), I am very tolerant of eccentric local pronunciations.”
“Joanna could see the lines of sleeplessness on his face beneath a thick coating of rice powder and rouge; the dark rings of bister and fatigue made the queer eyes even paler.”
“Those great eyes, smudged in with bister — aha, pools to drown love in!”
“Well, then, observe me; note the bister about my eyes, the swollen lips, the shaking hand.”
“She looked white and spent; there were bister circles round her eyes.”
The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English
“She had remarked that Francois 'forehead was stained or dyed of a bister color, his eyes were bloodshot and encircled with blue lines, his lips marked with furrows, like the impression which burning sulphur leaves on living flesh.”
“Kraften, de goda gudarnas gåva, bister som bärsärk biter i sköld.”
“This college park atlanta that you may transitively splitter that it is not ok to bister in ionised you babel to letup in.”
“* 'I give and bequeath to my bister Botty the sum of 90/. at my dejith, iind Forty more at the birth of her tirst child.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bister’.
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Steroids
Nouns that end in "ster". The -er suffix (as in blaster) doesn't count.
hamster, filibuster, aster, master, mister, baluster, banister, barrister, monster, plaster, semester, bister and 56 more...
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In The Colorhouse
A colorhouse - a manufactory of colors for tints, dyes, pigments, paints, glazes, &c. Terms associated with the science and history of colormaking.
All sorts of things went into color...colorhouse, Turkey red, dyebath, woad, ocher, lead white, mordant, Naples yellow, zaffer, kiln, vat, pot and 298 more...
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azd's Words
adamantine, abatial, ablate, ablative, abrogate, accretive, acromegaly, acrostic, actinism, actinic, acuity, adduce and 968 more...
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An Intermediate Course of Random Pala...
A third uncategorized list of words that catch my eye or fancy. Common or regional names and terms, names of foods and food preparation utensils, bird, plant and animal names, jargon words, and od...
lobscouse, skillygalee, skilly, skippaug, pauhagen, paughaden, poghaden, poggie, pog, skoodle, reef goose, reezle and 138 more...
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learning
A list of words whose meanings I am learning, either because a) I don't know the meaning b) I know the meaning, but could stand to better appreciate certain inflections or secondary meanings or c) ...
louche, educe, loam, cob, sclerotic, palliate, axial, syndicalist, ecumenical, sally, fatuous, parvenu and 1381 more...
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Dyes & Pigments
gamboge, anil, catechu, cinnabar, vermilion, ponceau, cochineal, kermes, lac, eosin, azure, indigo and 134 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1406 more...
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Chromonyms
These chromonyms are defined as colors in at least one dictionary (mostly MW3). (Actually there's one fake, for reasons I'll explain someday.) They are all one-word nouns such as "kelly", which can...
absinthe, acacia, acorn, alabaster, alesan, almond, aloma, amaranth, amber, amethyst, anemone, anil and 821 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for bister.
knitandpurl "The bard's voice slows down and, after the unfathomable and contradictory flow of words, grows vindictive, blaming all the opposing currents that crisscross the hall, sound like light filtering through in equal measure, music of the heavens where each beam by its sound fools the ear or lulls it into sleep: various shafts of light play upon the exalted heads, upon the symbols of each guild in bright, primary colors, a dominant green, deep as inexpressible blue, a quiver running through the branches of a century-old cedar; red, of neither fire nor blood, the deep shade of habit, restful to the eye; white encircling waves, desert effluvia; black, to obscure the names on tombs by night at the unheralded hour of sanctification that weight upon shoulders, burnūs of lemony wool with a fringe curiously embroidered with bister bees, with glitter-tipped emeralds."
Talismano by Abdelwaheb Meddeb, translated by Jane Kuntz, p 126 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback Sep 25, 2011
azd or bistre
Feb 23, 2007