wood engraving

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A block of wood on whose surface a design for printing is engraved across the end grain.
2. n. A print made from a wood engraving.
3. n. The art or process of making wood engravings.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The art or process of cutting designs in relief upon blocks of wood, usually box, so that impressions can be made from them with a pigment in a printing-press, upon paper or other ma terial. For cuts of more than 5 or 6 inches square, two or more blocks are firmly secured together. The sur face of the smoothed block, which is cut directly across the grain, is prepared for the engraver by rubbing it with pounded Bath brick mixed with a little water, in order to give a hold to the lead-pencil, and the subject is drawn in with pencil or India ink, or is transferred upon the block by photography. The engraver then, by means of gravers, tint-tools, gouges or scrapers, and fiat tools or chisels of dif ferent sizes, cuts out the design, leaving it in raised lines or dots upon the surface of the block, so that these may receive the ink and yield the desired impression under the action of the press. In such parts of the design as are to be solid black, the engraver leaves the surface of the wood untouched; in such parts as are to be wholly white, he cuts the surface entirely away; the large num ber of tones, technically called tints, between these ex tremes are rendered by cutting out wider or narrower spaces, corresponding to white paper in the print, between the lines or dots left in relief. An engraving is seldom a mere reproduction of the copy; it is a translation, into which the personal element of the engraver enters: thus the engraving may be either superior or inferior artisti cally to the original. Wood-engraving is technically the opposite of steel- or copperplate-engraving: in the lat ter the lines cut by the engraver form the picture; in the former the parts of the surface left uncut form the picture.
2. n. A block of wood engraved by the above method, or an impression from such a block.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. An engraving on wood; a wood cut; also, a print from such an engraving.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a print made from a woodcut
2. n. engraving consisting of a block of wood with a design cut into it; used to make prints