Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Spotted or blotched with different shades or colors.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- 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. In mottled iron the whiter parts of the metal are disseminated through the grayer, so that the whole has a spotted or mottled appearance. The grayest iron contains the largest amount of graphitic carbon: the whitest iron the least graphitic and the most combined carbon.
Wiktionary
- adj. Colored in patches; spotted.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Marked with spots of different colors; variegated; spotted.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. having spots or patches of color
Examples
“Her bright russet hair sliding out of a barrette, her skin mottled, her face carefully neutral.”
“Under his feet was the velvet grass, the trees arched overhead, and he stood in mottled sunshine.”
“Toasted skin syndrome" is what Swiss researchers have dubbed a mottled-skin condition caused by long-term heat exposure.”
The Washington Post: Toasted skin syndrome: Laptops burning skin
“The hemp, nutmeg and sage colors are kind of mottled while the others are solid.”
PAPERSTONE & RICHLITE: From Countertop to Half Pipe! | Inhabitat
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The most prominent symptom was a discoloration of the skin, a kind of mottled-bronze or grayish effect produced by the overproduction of the skin pigment melanin.”
The Human Brain
“On the stretcher, so covered up that only his face was visible, lay one whom at first I failed to recognize, for the horribly contorted features presented a kind of mottled green appearance utterly indescribable.”
“He looked kind of mottled and anguished, but I guess he'll pull around all right.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mottled’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
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October Words-11849
During the month of October, post at least 10 new words to this list. Make sure you cite where you read the word (book/author/pg) and quote the context/sentence where you found it. If someone has a...
desalination, Girn, incongruous, irreparably, pneumatic, metastatic, languorous, menagerie, mottled, valise, moot, deferential and 28 more...
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Bluraven's list
These are words that have a certain beauty about them and a gentleness on the tongue.
mellifluous, meretricious, vituperation, loquacious, auspicious, coherently, contumaciously, contumely, contumelious, perspicacity, perspicuous, obstreperous and 29 more...
JTroyer "-in the mottled patterns of their battered torso..." Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen Oct 17, 2010