Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A drawing or inscription made on a wall or other surface, usually so as to be seen by the public. Often used in the plural.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In archaeology, an ancient scribbling scratched, painted, or otherwise marked on a wall, column, tablet, or other surface. Graffiti abound on nearly all sites of ancient civilization, particularly those under Roman domination. They comprise more or less rude sketches, names, sentences, and remarks of all kinds, like similar modern scribblings, and are often of much archæological and historical importance.
- n. In art, a scratching or scoring for the production of designs or effects.
- n. A vessel of pottery decorated in graffito.
Wiktionary
- n. archaeology and related fields An informal inscription, as by a worker or vandal.
- n. rare A single instance of graffiti in the art/vandalism sense.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Art) Production of decorative designs by scratching them through a surface of layer plaster, glazing, etc., revealing a different-colored ground; also, pottery or ware so decorated; -- chiefly used attributively.
- n. the singular form of graffiti, seldom used.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a rude decoration inscribed on rocks or walls
Etymologies
- Italian graffito. (Wiktionary)
- Italian, diminutive of graffio, a scratching, scribble, probably from graffiare, to scratch, scribble, probably from Vulgar Latin *graphiāre, to write with a stylus, from Latin graphium, stylus, from Greek grapheion, graphion, from graphein, to write. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“When the inscription is properly cut into the stone, it is called a titulus or marble; if merely scratched on the stone, the Italian word graffito is used; a painted inscription is called dipinto, and a mosaic inscription — such as are found largely in North Africa, Spain, and the East — bears the name of opus musivum.”
“Second, the fact that this particular graffito is so cleverly executed, given how it blends in.”
“His tomb bore this Latin graffito: "Hic jacet impius Pios" — "here lies an impious pope between two Piuses.”
“Emphasis will be placed on surface design techniques such as graffito and stenciling.”
“We biked along the Czech Republic's border with Austria and made our way to villages like Slavonice and Telc, known for buildings done in ornamental graffito; Cizov, for a slice of Iron Curtain; and Jindrichuv Hradec, home to the country's third largest castle.”
“A classicist by training, Mr. Toohey argues, to the contrary, that boredom has always been with us, which seems plausible enough if this ancient graffito from a much-scribbled-on wall in Pompeii is anything to go by: Wall!”
“Consider also media (from medium), criteria (from criterion), graffiti (from graffito), and stamina (from stamen).”
“A man called Kilroy travels into the US wartime past of the 1940s, and leaves in a graffito a mark of his presence.”
“The kids who get up at midnight and head out to a derelict wall to begin working on a graffito are working within a demanding tradition that requires the sequence of execution to have been worked out in detail in advance, before any mark can be made.”
The Guardian: Now please pay attention everybody. I'm about to tell you what art is | Germaine Greer
“A graffito on a railway bridge is more likely to be art, most probably bad art, but art just the same.”
The Guardian: Now please pay attention everybody. I'm about to tell you what art is | Germaine Greer
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘graffito’.
-
On with their heads!
Words that make other words with the addition of one letter at the beginning. The resulting words are tagged "behead".
men, his, yes, any, iota, limb, aged, laid, land, lead, read, word and 327 more...
-
forms/acts: art
threnody, eisegesis, imbricate, screed, lapis, requiem, colophon, homunculus, deus ex machina, apophthegm, anastrophe, anaphora and 47 more...
-
Marks
names of punctuation marks, accent marks, and other graphic signs and graphical characters used in printed, written, or digital text.
comma, period, parenthesis, apostrophe, colon, semicolon, slash, stroke, brackets, dash, em dash, en dash and 72 more...
-
graphism
of or related to drawing—forms, tools, techniques, processes, practices, etc.
limn, vectorial, limned, synecdoche, adumbrate, lapis, colophon, grapheme, isogloss, sciagraphy, palimpsest, homunculus and 18 more...
-
cutting words
sarcasm, sarx, sarcoptic, syssarcosis, shrew, shrewd, screed, scred, shroud, scroll, scrod, scrutiny and 326 more...
-
JJMARLETTE's Words
phantasmagorical, antidisestablishm..., gargantuan, apocryphal, maim, disembowel, viscous, apothecary, seminal, exponential, googol, googolplex and 90 more...
-
die6die's Words
somnambulist, obfuscate, hirsute, kleptobibliomania, serendipitous, dissuade, duplicitous, zounds, lo, unleash, fortnight, thaumaturgy and 278 more...
-
Balsamic's Words
vignette, itinerant, maladies, hagiographic, dour, ethereal, credence, solemnity, provenance, vestigial, dissonance, melancholia and 221 more...
-
In rare form
They make sense. You just don't hear them used much in these ways.
regardful, hypoactive, spiteless, delible, fanciless, digamy, plosion, nocuous, sipid, uttermore, eyesome, feck and 5 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for graffito.
Comments
No comments yet...
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.