SURFACES, TEXTURES, AND COMPOSITION
flat or without varying elevation
plane, level, planate, tabular, tabulate
made flat, flattened
applanate, planiform, complanate
on a plane or unbroken surface
flat, level, planar, tabular, flattened, even, applanate, homaloidal
constituting the final coating on a surface
finished
the process of painting a finish that has the look of a solid material such as marble, stone, or wood
faux finishing
sheen produced, by age or use, on a surface
patina
diminished in luster owing to the effect of air, dust, or dirt
tarnished
green patina, as on copper, bronze, or brass, produced by long exposure to air or seawater
verdigris
bent or twisted out of its plane
warped, buckled
smooth and free of roughness
even, uniform, glabrous, levigate
smooth and shiny
lustrous, glossy, polished, burnished, buffed, glazed, gleaming, glistening, glinting, glassy, suave, silken, silky
coated to be smooth and shiny
varnished, shellacked, lacquered, enameled
like glass
glassy, glazed, glazy, vitreous, vitriform, hyaline
not shiny
lusterless, dull, matte
having an uneven surface
irregular, bumpy, humpy, hummocky, lumpy
rough
coarse, prickly, scabrous, abrasive, scratchy, choppy, ragged, jagged, sandpapery
rough with prominent irregularities
scraggly, scraggy
soft and lustrous
silken, silky, satiny
finished with a nap produced by brushing
brushed
soft and silky with a deep pile
plush
felt-like
pannose
velvety
velutinous
hairy
hirsute, bristly
fuzzy
shaggy, nubby
having wrinkles
wrinkled, corrugated, rugose, crinkly, crinkled, crispate, creased
having a pushed-up surface
raised, embossed, relief, in relief
having rounded protuberances
knobbed
having small rounded protuberances
pimpled
having hard ornamental protuberances
studded
having raised (relief) patterns made by hammering the other side
repoussé
knobby
studded, lumpy, nubby, nubbly, knubbly, nubbed, noded, noduled
having a cut-into surface
carved, incised, inscribed, etched, engraved, tooled
having small plane surfaces, as a cut gem
faceted, facetted
having (produced) minute cracks in the surface or glaze
crazed
worn or aged by the elements
weathered, weather-beaten, eroded
deliberately marred or faded so as to appear aged or worn
distressed
having small pits or indentations
pitted, pocked, pockmarked, dimpled, depressed, indented
having hammered indentations
chased
sharp
acute, cutting, keen-edged, keen, knife-edged, knife-like, razor-edged, razor-like, cultrate
having sharp projections
thorny, prickly, barbed, spiny, echinated
not sharp
dull, blunt, obtund, obtuse
having a sliced opening or openings
slit, cut, slashed, incised, gashed, scissored, hacked
having scratches
scratched, scored, abraded, scuffed, scraped, scarred
dyed or stained
tinged, imbrued, imbued, infused
splashed or sprinkled upon, as with a different substance or color
splattered, spattered
having a distinct, often protective top plate or layer
laminated
sticky
viscous, viscid, adhesive, gummy, pasty, mucilaginous, glutinous, tacky
covered with another material or substance
overlaid
coated
covered, bedaubed, lacquered, filmy, overlayed, glossed, dipped
coated with a surface of metal
plated, electroplated, clad
coated with a glossy surface
enameled
painted thickly
pastose, impasted, impasto
covered with a crust
encrusted, caked
marked irregularly or dirtied
smudged, smeared, streaked
solid
substantial, dense, concrete, material, palpable, intact
hard
firm, unyielding, inflexible, rock-hard, stonelike, flinty, adamantine, indurate, steely
hardened
toughened, indurated
marble-like
marmoreal, marbled
granite-like
granitic
cement-like
cementitious
diamond-like
adamantine, diamantine
having a grain-like composition
grainy, granular, gritty, coarse-grained, rough-grained, granulated, branny
having a sand-like composition
sandy, sabulous, tophaceous, arenaceous, arenarious
stiff
rigid, starchy, inelastic, inflexible, inextensible, unyielding
tight
taut
tough
fibrous, leathery, coriaceous, sinewy, ropy, stringy, gristly, chewy
soft
yielding, pliant, pulpy, doughy, mushy
limp
flaccid, slack, loose, baggy, droopy, floppy, loppy
lacking solidity
flimsy, unsubstantial, gossamer
breakable or brittle
fragile, crisp, frangible, frail, crackable, crushable
easily pulverized or crumbled
friable, crumbly, pulverizable, shivery
easily cuttable or splittable
scissile
rubbery, elastic
blubbery, resilient, springy
yielding
clay-like, doughy, pudding-like, pulpy, porridge-like, pultaceous
flexible
bendable, pliable, pliant, elastic, resilient, ductile, plastic
moldable
supple, malleable, fictile
stretchable
tensile, ductile, extensible, extensile
mealy
floury, farinaceous
flaky
scaly, squamate, shivery
without moisture
dry, arid, desiccated, parched, sere
offering poor or no traction
slippery, slippy, slick, lubricated, lubricious, glossy
oily, greasy, fatlike
slick, oleaginous, unguinous, sebaceous, pinguid
soapy
saponaceous, lathered
moist, damp
dank, bedewed, dewy, roral, rorid, imbrued, embrued
wet, watery
fluid, serous, liquid
very wet
sodden, soaked, saturated, permeated, soggy, suffused
coolly moist and sticky
clammy
absorbent
porous, leachy
wet and yielding
spongy, semiliquid, pulpy, mushy, slushy, squashy, squishy, oozy, slimy, gooey
thick
clotted, grumous
soft like nap or down
fluffy, downy, fleecy, cottony, feathery, lanuginous, lanuginose
woolly
flocculent, lanate, lanose
feathery
plumy
pillow-like
cushiony, puffy
dense
compact, compacted, close-textured, thick, consolidated, condensed
clotted
congealed, coagulated, bunched, compacted
separable
fissile, scissile, partable, dissociable
very thin
sheer, lawny
light and somewhat transparent
filmy, gauzy, gossamer, cobwebby
powdery, dusty
floury, chalky, triturated, comminuted, pulverous, pulverulent
foamy
frothy, spumescent
jelly-like
gelatinous, colloidal, jelled
cork-like
suberose
rocky
petrous, calcified
stony
pebbled, pebbly, gravelly
In the pool of light shed onto her lap, an exquisitely manicured hand guides a slender gold-plated propelling pencil across the lines of print, occasionally pausing to underline a sentence or make a marginal note. The long, spear-shaped finger-nails on the hand are lacquered with terracotta varnish. The hand itself, long and white and slender, looks almost weighed down with three antique rings in which are set ruby, sapphire, and emerald stones.
—DAVID LODGE, Small World
Pseudo-Arabic minarets, dentils, and spindled galleries silhouette the outlines of furniture designed on the circle and its parts—the arc and chord. The wooden frame was covered in chamois leather within repoussé metal mounts or veneered in pewter and brass with insect-like motifs and Middle Eastern calligraphy.
—ALASTAIR DUNCAN, Art Nouveau Furniture
On the men drifted. Several days passed with no food and no rain. The raft was a gelatinous mess, its patches barely holding on, some spots bubbling outward, on the verge of popping. It wouldn’t bear the men’s weight much longer.
In the sky, Phil noticed something different. There were more birds. Then they began to hear planes. Sometimes they’d see a tiny speck in the sky, sometimes two or more together, making a distant buzz. They were always much too far away to be signaled, and both men knew that as far west as they had probably drifted, these planes were surely Japanese.
—LAURA HILLENBRAND, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Sometimes the ice is black and glossy, blasted smooth by the endless wind, with only a few swaths of snow lying on it. Sometimes it is hummocky, with drifts of snow sheltered behind the hummocks. Sometimes it is ridged and buckled from the enormous strains of the wind, the currents and the line of advancing bergs.
—RICHARD BROWN, Voyage of the Iceberg: The Story of the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic
Momma Hattie served blackened everything, fried foods that had to be coaxed out of the skillet with a metal spatula and serious scraping. Then she poured the greasy residue into a Crisco can, where it congealed into schmaltz: a slippery mass whose consistency would hold your thumbprint until it came time to melt it down again.
—DAVID BERG, Run, Brother Run
It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
And my mother, of course. I linger over her. But reluctantly, memory going cloudier, Mom in her best little smart suit, short tweed skirt, great gams, Mom in her perfect makeup, her hair in a perfect coil glistening with lacquer, secret pins.
—BILL ROORBACH, Life among Giants
My horse was not above medium size, but he was alert, slender-limbed, muscled with watch springs, and just a greyhound to go. He was a beauty, glossy as silk, and naked as he was when he was born, except for bridle and ranger saddle.
—MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
—TIM O’BRIEN, The Things They Carried
The drama classroom was in a portable, one-room prefabricated building on cinder blocks in the middle of the schoolyard. It was a shoes-off environment, no desks, just wall-to-wall nylon broadloom in a mottled goldenrod. The carpet was pilled, matted with staples and crumbs, and waxy with years of adolescent foot sweat. About fifteen hopefuls sat on the floor in a circle around the drama teacher, who sat with her legs folded under her, Zen tea master-like. She surveyed us and then her eyes lit upon me. She gave me a small smile, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly, while at the same time from her nose I could hear a small puff, the softest whisper of breath. The sound a pillow makes when you sink your head into it.
—DAVID RAKOFF, Half Empty
He lets the book fall closed. It makes an exhausted sound, like a padded door shutting, by itself, at a distance: a puff of air. The sound suggests the softness of the thin oniony pages, how they would feel under the fingers. Soft and dry, like papier poudre, pink and powdery, from the time before, you’d get it in booklets for taking the shine off your nose, in those stores that sold candles and soap in the shapes of things: seashells, mushrooms. Like cigarette paper. Like petals.
—MARGARET ATWOOD, The Handmaid’s Tale
Janice owned one pair of boots which she wore in all seasons, repairing them with Sellotape when they threatened to fall apart. Over the boots she wore a filmy gypsy skirt of no colour that Treslove could distinguish and over that a grey-and-blue cardigan the sleeves of which she wore long, as though to protect her fingertips from the cold. In all weathers, Janice’s extremities were cold, like those of an orphan child, as Treslove imagined, in a Victorian novel.
—HOWARD JACOBSON, The Finkler Question
She had a vision of her mad wet face against the sky, as she rocked on the slippery stone. She tried to catch at her habit to help her, but the stuff was slimy with wet and dirt. Then Sister Ruth seemed to fall into the sky with a scream, as she went over the railings.
—RUMER GODDEN, Black Narcissus
In the estimation of here and there a man of weak judgment, it was greatly in the parson’s power to have helped the figure of this horse of his,—for he was master of a very handsome demi-peaked saddle, quilted on the seat with green plush garnished with a double row of silver-headed studs, and a noble pair of shining brass stirrups, with a housing altogether suitable, of grey superfine cloth, with an edging of black lace, terminating in a deep, black, silk fringe, poudre d’or,—all which he had purchased in the pride and prime of his life, together with a grand embossed bridle, ornamented at all points as it should be.
—LAURENCE STERNE, Tristram Shandy
A grainy, porous overlay might account for the waffling or graham-cracker appearance of much of the surface in the photos.
—RICHARD S. LEWIS, Appointment on the Moon
Mostly it was the timid who perished: they died easily, and their corpses were thrown into the rivers and irrigation ditches or just left in the sun to rot. Let them know that you are dangerous. The crows ate the grasshoppers and let the wasps alone.
Martin, convinced of his logic but not free of dread, started down the road toward Tepazatlán.
The asphalt was still tacky from the day’s heat. There were only a few clouds tonight, rows of wispy crescents drifting down from the north. The cambered black road, curving down through low hills, reminded him of the river. There were fields and pastures and patches of scrub forest on both sides of the road.
—RON FAUST, In the Forest of the Night
In front were the dark green glassy waters of an unvisited backwater; and beyond them a bright lawn set with many walnut trees and a few great chestnuts, well lit with their candles, and to the left of that a low white house with a green dome rising in its middle and a veranda whose roof of hammered iron had gone verdigris colour with age and the Thames weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn.
—REBECCA WEST, The Return of the Soldier
The buttress merged with roof and floor in flowing and perfectly proportioned curves. And on its face was superimposed a small, delicately sculptured column, so oddly weathered that it seemed almost a decorative afterthought. The surface of this column was rounded and smooth, as if it had been sandpapered by a patient carpenter, and its fine-drawn strata stood out sharp and clear, like the grain on unstained, highly polished wood.
—ERNEST BRAUN, Grand Canyon of the Living Colorado
This whole apartment is gleaming and slidey. You could be inside a bubble, here—a dark pearl hanging in the middle of the sky. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: four mornings a week Lupe comes to clean and launder and put things in order. The floors have been bleached almost translucent, and stained, and a crew of other painters has done something to the walls to make them dark and glassy, so that Jamie’s leaves look like they’re twining right in the air.
—DEBORAH EISENBERG, “Rosie Gets a Soul,” The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
But after a foot or two of this ladder-like progression they are faced either with the battering fall of white water at their left or with a smooth black stretch of rock wall in front, hit every few seconds by heavy splashes of spray. For a few feet at the bottom of this wall grows a close slimy fur of waterweed, and among its infinitesimal tendrils the elvers twine themselves and begin, very slowly, to squirm their way upwards, forming a vertical, close-packed queue perhaps two feet wide.
—GAVIN MAXWELL, Ring of Bright Water
If I were a speck of slime mold, both one and many, a single-celled swarm, a gelatinous glob of peanut butter—like ooze on the forest floor, I would hustle after prey at a flat-out l mile per hour, streaming my slime one way, then another, to gather up bacteria, protozoa, grass, and rotting leaves.
—DIANE ACKERMAN, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day
The injury was much worse than when they had heard her screaming and had run through the habitat and pulled her up through the A Cyl hatch. Now, running diagonally down her leg was a series of saucer-shaped welts, the center of each puffed and purple. “It’s swollen a lot in the last hour,” Tina said.
Norman examined the injuries. Fine toothmarks ringed swollen areas. “Do you remember what it felt like?” he said.
“It felt awful,” Tina said. “It felt sticky, you know, like sticky glue or something. And then each one of these round places burned. Very strong.”
—MICHAEL CRICHTON, Sphere
Monday dawns a full gale, the seas building to twenty feet and the wind shearing ominously through the rigging. The sea takes on a grey, marbled look, like bad meat.
—SEBASTIAN JUNGER, The Perfect Storm
The cross-legged one (wearing a woman’s dress, but it may be a boy) puts out his hands over the eggs and gently shuffles them a little closer together, letting a couple of the outer ones roll back into his palms. The eggs are a creamy buff, thick-shelled, their glaze pored and lightly speckled, their shape more pointed than a hen’s, and the palms of the small black hands are translucent-looking apricot-pink.
—NADINE GORDIMER, The Conservationist
Fifty dirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half the tramps actually bathed (I heard them saying that hot water is “weakening” to the system), but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy little clouts known as toe-rags which they bind round their toes.
—GEORGE ORWELL, Down and Out in Paris and London
I gave the cabbie a ridiculous tip, and as the taxi departed I noticed that awful old car backed down in the neighbours’ parking space again. This time, seeing the front of the old ruin I realized it was an Armstrong Siddeley, a grand English dinosaur from 1950. The paints of the period were all toxic toluene nightmares, polluting the air even as they began their life. In 2010 its skin was cracked and chalky, more like dead fish than a dinosaur, a skate, dead shark skin amongst the sand and seaweed.
—PETER CAREY, The Chemistry of Tears
They would never be like Mrs. Grandlieu’s old timber house, with its worn decorative woodwork, its internal arches of fretwork arabesques that caught the dust, its mahogany-stained floor springy but polished smooth, the hard graining of the floorboards standing out from the softer wood.
—V. S. NAIPAUL, Guerrillas
The flour falls solidly, in a mound that loosely echoes the shape of the measuring cup. A bigger cloud rises, almost touches his face, then vanishes. He stares down at what he’s made: a white hill, slightly granular, speckled with pinpoint shadows, standing up from the glossy, creamier white of the bowl’s interior.
—MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, The Hours
Cobblestones, which for aeons have rubbed against each other, are ideally smooth. They are firm and pleasant to the touch, smooth and definitive in form, absolutely precise in textural effect. Granite flagstones which have been worn smooth by the feet of generations of walkers have the same character.
—STEEN EILER RASMUSSEN, Experiencing Architecture
I could not go abroad in snow—it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man—a bubble. And fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity.
—H. G. WELLS, The Invisible Man