blotch
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /blɒtʃ/
ipa: /blɑt͡ʃ/
rhymes: -ɒtʃ
Forms: form: blotches
Etymology: Uncertain. Perhaps a blend of blot + botch.
Senses: examples: text: 1711, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, London: J. & R. Tonson, 12th edition, Volume I, No. 16, p. 68,
[…] in healing those Blotches and Tumours which break out in the body […]
text: Since the day in which this reformation began, by how many strange and critical turns has it been perfected and handed down, if not, entirely without spot or wrinkle,—at least, without great blotches or marks of anility.
ref: 1768, Laurence Sterne, Sermon VI, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, volume 3, London: T. Becket & P.A. De Hondt, pages 182–183:
text: Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; […] it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches;
ref: 1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book II, Chapter 2:
text: 1921, Wallace Stevens, Sur Ma Guzzla Gracile, Palace of the Babies, in Poetry, Volume 19, No. 1,
The disbeliever walked the moonlit place,
Outside the gates of hammered serafin,
Observing the moon-blotches on the walls.
glosses: An uneven patch of color or discoloration.
examples: text: At Coleman's Hill, the upper beds consist of yellowish, soft, gritty sandstone, containing some small calcareous fragments, a few pebbles of quartz, blotches of red shale, and fragments of sandstone with impressions of stems of plants.
ref: 1839, The Silurian System:
text: His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his brown neck.
ref: 1923, Willa Cather, One of Ours, Book One, Chapter 5:
text: Microscopic and sometimes macroscopic examination of the apparently healthy intervening tissue may reveal the fungus connecting the blotches of diseased tissue.
ref: 1938, Henry Bake Steer, Stumpage Prices of Privately Owned Timber in the United States:
text: Evil places where the wind whistles and the dust grates, places that are blotches of shadow, blotches of rust, blotches of oil: innumerable blotches.
ref: 2010, J.M.G. Le Clezio, The Book of Flights, →ISBN:
glosses: An irregularly shaped area.
examples: 1921, Warren G. Harding, Inaugural address, in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: from George Washington to Barack Obama, Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1989,
There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.
glosses: Imperfection; blemish on one’s reputation, stain.
examples: text: The fungus causing blotch lives through the winter in the cankers which it has developed on twigs, water sprouts, and fruit spurs.
ref: 1926, John William Roberts, Leslie Pierce, Apple blotch, page 3:
text: Blue mold and the black rot fungus are most Commonly found associated with blotch in this way.
ref: 1951, Dean Humboldt Rose, Lacy Porter McColloch, D. F. Fisher, Market Diseases of Fruits and Vegetables: Apples, Pears, Quinces:
text: Blotch is one of the most common and serious diseases of A. bisporus and is responsible for considerable losses.
ref: 1999, Diseases of Horticultural Crops: Vegetables, Ornamentals, and Mushrooms, →ISBN:
text: Pseudomonas is the major spoilage genus associated with blotch in fresh mushrooms.
ref: 2015, Marian Petre, Mushroom Biotechnology: Developments and Applications, →ISBN, page 98:
glosses: Any of various crop diseases that cause the plant to form spots.
examples: text: Characteristics of blotches are that they seldom appear at the same spatial location in consecutive frames, they tend to be smooth (little texture), and they usually have intensity values that are very different from the original contents they cover.
ref: 1999, Jim Byrnes, Signal Processing for Multimedia, →ISBN, page 173:
text: Films corrupted by blotches are often restored in a two-step approach. The first step detects blotches and generates binary detection masks that indicate whether each pixel is part of a blotch. The second step corrects pixels by means of spatio-temporal interpolation.
ref: 2000, A. Hanjalic, G.C. Langelaar, P.M.B. van Roosmalen, Image and Video Databases: Restoration, Watermarking and Retrieval, →ISBN, page 14:
text: Archive film materials are particularly degraded by blotch, scratch, flicker and noise.
ref: 2005, Pinar Yolum, Computer and Information Sciences - ISCIS 2005, →ISBN:
glosses: A bright or dark spot on old film caused by dirt and loss of the gelatin covering the film, due to age and poor film quality.
glosses: A dark spot on the skin; a pustule.
glosses: Blotting paper.
Derived terms: aspen leaf blotch miner moth
blotchily
blotchiness
blotchless
blotch on the escutcheon
blotchwork
blotchy
corn blotch leafminer
net blotch
pimple and blotch
side-blotched lizard
sooty blotch and flyspeck
sunblotch
unblotched