Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Loose friable soil, rich in humus and fit for planting.
  • noun The earth; the ground.
  • noun The earth of the grave.
  • noun Archaic Earth as the substance of the human body.
  • noun Any of various filamentous fungi that grow on and contribute to the decay of organic matter.
  • noun A growth of such fungi.
  • noun Any of various other saprophytic or parasitic organisms that resemble fungi, such as slime molds or water molds.
  • intransitive verb To become moldy.
  • noun A hollow form or matrix for shaping a fluid or plastic substance.
  • noun A frame or model around or on which something is formed or shaped.
  • noun Something that is made in or shaped on a mold.
  • noun The shape or pattern of a mold.
  • noun General shape or form.
  • noun Distinctive character or type.
  • noun A fixed or restrictive pattern or form.
  • intransitive verb To form (something) out of a fluid or plastic material.
  • intransitive verb To form into a particular shape; give shape to.
  • intransitive verb To guide or determine the growth or development of; influence.
  • intransitive verb To fit closely by following the contours of (the body). Used of clothing.
  • intransitive verb To assume a certain shape.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Grown musty; molded; moldy.
  • noun A spot; a stain, as that caused by rust.
  • noun An obsolete form of mole.
  • To cover with mold.
  • noun Fine soft earth, or earth easily pulverized, such as constitutes soil; crumbling or friable soil.
  • noun The earth; the ground.
  • noun The matter of which anything is formed; material.
  • noun In paleontology, the external impression of an organic body, test, or skeleton in the rocks: contrasted with cast, which is an internal impression. See cast, 14.
  • To grow musty; become moldy; contract mold.
  • To cause to contract mold: as, damp molds cheese.
  • To stain, as with rust.
  • To form into a particular shape; shape; model; fashion; cast in or as in a mold; specifically, to form articles of clay upon a whirling table or potter's wheel, or in molds which open and close like those employed in metal-casting.
  • In ship-building, to give the required depth and outline to, as ships' timbers.
  • noun A form or model pattern of a particular shape, used in determining the shape of something in a molten, plastic, or otherwise yielding state.
  • noun Form; shape; cast; character.
  • noun Specifically, in founding, the form into which a fused metal is run to obtain a cast.
  • noun In terra-cotta work, the plaster forms used in making terra-cotta architectural ornaments.
  • noun In stucco-work, a templet or former for shaping cornices, centerpieces, etc.
  • noun In paper-manufacture, a frame with a bottom of wire netting which is filled with paper-pulp that in draining away leaves a film of pulp which is formed into a sheet of paper.
  • noun In ship-building, the pattern used in working out the frames of a vessel.
  • noun A former or matrix used in various household operations, as an incised stamp of wood for shaping and ornamenting pats of butter, or a form of metal, earthenware, etc., for giving shape to jellies, blanc-mange, ices, etc.
  • noun In cookery, a dish shaped in a mold: as, a mold of jelly.
  • noun In anatomy, same as fontanelle, 2.
  • noun Among gold-beaters, a number of pieces of vellum or a like substance, laid over one another, between which the leaves of gold are laid for the final beating.
  • noun A minute fungus or other vegetable growth of a low type, especially one of such vegetable organisms as appear on articles of food when left neglected, decaying matter, bodies which lie long in warm and damp air, animal and vegetable tissues, etc.; in a somewhat looser sense, mustiness or incipient decay.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete A spot; a blemish; a mole.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English molde; see melə- in Indo-European roots.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English moulde, probably from past participle of moulen, to grow moldy, from Old Norse mygla.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English molde, from Old French modle, molle, from Latin modulus, diminutive of modus, measure; see med- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Via Middle English and Old French, from Latin modulus

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English molde, from Proto-Germanic *muldō ‘dirt, soil’ (compare Old Frisian molde, Middle Dutch moude, Dutch moude, obsolete German Molte, Norwegian mold), from Proto-Indo-European *ml̥-tā (compare Old Irish moll ‘bran’, Lithuanian mìltai ‘flour’), from *mel- (compare English meal). More at meal.

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Examples

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  • See mold.

    See mold mold.

    Mold, mold, mold!

    November 4, 2008

  • And mould.

    November 4, 2008

  • I know. I teach classless American brats. Thus, we are growing mold, not mould. I'm sure our fungi would be all the more lush next-door to the Emerald Isle.

    November 4, 2008

  • Mould does sound more lush than mold, come to think of it....

    November 4, 2008

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    July 30, 2011