Etimology
From Middle English pycture, from Old French picture, itself from Latin pictūra (“the art of painting, a painting”), from pingō (“I paint”). Doublet of pictura.
noun
picture (plural pictures)
A representation of anything (as a person, a landscape, a building) upon canvas, paper, or other surface, by drawing, painting, printing, photography, etc.
An image; a representation as in the imagination.
A painting.
A photograph.
(dated) A motion picture.
(in the plural, informal) ("the pictures") Cinema (as a form of entertainment).
A paragon, a perfect example or specimen (of a category).
An attractive sight.
The art of painting; representation by painting.
A figure; a model.
Situation.
(MLE) A sample of an illegal drug.
(programming) A format string in the COBOL programming language.
Examples
Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out. […]. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle served as a shaft.
Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.
My eyes make pictures when they are shut.
So this was my future home, I thought! Certainly it made a brave picture. I had seen similar ones fired-in on many a Heidelberg stein. Backed by towering hills, […] a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.
Prior to seeing him and meeting him, and hearing him speak, I had conjured up a picture of him in my mind, which actual contact with him proved to be an illusion. I had conceived of him […] as being tall, commanding, and as the advance notices of him, a sliver-tongued orator. I found him, however, to be the opposite of my mental picture; short, squat, unpretentious […].
There was a picture hanging above the fireplace.
Here the stripped panelling was warmly gold and the pictures, mostly of the English school, were mellow and gentle in the afternoon light.
I took a picture of the church.
Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful / Pictures of Lily helped me sleep at night
I've been looking so long at these pictures of you / That I almost believe that they're real
Casablanca is my all-time favorite picture.
"You make moving pictures. In jungles and places." "That's me. And I've picked you for the lead in my next picture."
Let's go to the pictures.
She's the very picture of health.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in poor health for much of his presidency, even though his doctors, his family, and even journalists colluded to portray him as the picture of health.
The garden is a real picture at this time of year.
it was heartening to see a young Indian football team Mata had invited to Manchester. His face was a picture when he listened to the little footballers sing a team song for him.
any well-expressed image […] either in picture or sculpture
the young king's picture […] in virgin wax
The employment picture for the older middle class is not so good.
You can't just look at the election, you've got to look at the big picture.
If you want me to buy your weed I’ll need a picture.
The COBOL restriction for the currency symbol in a picture string to be replaced by a single character currency symbol is a compromise solution.
To recapitulate, the pictures we have considered so far are: X – any character A — alphabetic characters and the space character […]
Related words
synonyms
(representation as in the imagination): image
hyponyms
big picture
motion picture
related terms
out of the picture
picture framing
picture postcard
picture tube
pretty as a picture
very picture of
verb
picture (third-person singular simple present pictures, present participle picturing, simple past and past participle pictured)
(transitive) To represent in or with a picture.
(transitive) To imagine or envision.
(transitive) To depict or describe vividly.
Examples
What is striking about the self portrait is that the patient had pictured herself as a much younger woman
while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut.
Anyone "skilled in the art" could see from their language that Lemp and Wightman had not invented or patented the invention their draftsman had pictured.
Picture yourself on a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
If you can picture this—a day in December / Picture this—freezing cold weather / You got clouds on your lids and you'd be on the skids
I had never found him so impossible to soften or to move. I tried this way and I tried that; I pictured his future in an English gaol; I described the sorrow of his mother when I came back with the news; I said everything to touch his heart, but all to no purpose.
Drawing is picturing people, places, and things with line.
Many rock paintings picture various species of fish.
A plain, seemingly graceless stylist, his rather unpalatable movies, full of rabid, sloggingly orchestrated physical pain and psychic damage, picture crime as a monstrous, miasmal evil, divesting it of any glamour it ever had.
The sketch pictured here takes in the whole scene.
Related words
related terms
depict
depiction
pictorial