daubed


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daub

 (dôb)
v. daubed, daub·ing, daubs
v.tr.
1. To cover or smear with a soft adhesive substance such as plaster, grease, or mud.
2. To apply paint to (a surface) with hasty or crude strokes.
3. To apply with quick or crude strokes: daubed glue on the paper.
v.intr.
1. To apply paint or coloring with crude, unskillful strokes.
2. To make crude or amateurish paintings.
3. To daub a sticky material.
n.
1. The act or a stroke of daubing.
2. A soft adhesive coating material such as plaster, grease, or mud.
3. Matter daubed on.
4. A crude, amateurish painting or picture.

[Middle English dauben, from Old French dauber, from Latin dēalbāre, to whitewash : dē-, intensive pref.; see de- + albus, white; see albho- in Indo-European roots.]

daub′er n.
daub′er·y (dô′bə-rē) n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in classic literature ?
But yet, since princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy, than daubed with cost.
Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass.
The good people of the Hague had chopped off the flesh of its victims, but faithfully carried the remainder to the gibbet, to have a pretext for a double inscription written on a huge placard, on which Cornelius; with the keen sight of a young man of twenty-eight, was able to read the following lines, daubed by the coarse brush of a sign-painter: --
The bestial faces, daubed with color--the huge mouths and flabby hanging lips--the yellow teeth, sharp filed--the rolling, demon eyes--the shining naked bodies--the cruel spears.
However, he was not to be discouraged; he daubed his face over brown and black; pulled his cap over his ears, and knocked at the door.
Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box.
The canoe was between thirty and forty feet long, and several feet in width; constructed of birch bark, sewed with fibres of the roots of the spruce tree, and daubed with resin of the pine, instead of tar.
Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the two cellars, whose supports had been daubed with numberless couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself.
An artist friend fitted her out with his castoff palettes, brushes, and colors, and she daubed away, producing pastoral and marine views such as were never seen on land or sea.
By-and-by, one group after another came straggling back to the mouth of the cave, panting, hilarious, smeared from head to foot with tallow drippings, daubed with clay, and entirely delighted with the success of the day.
He still wore the fine broadcloth suit in which he had fulfilled his mission, but it was bitterly the worse for wear, daubed with clay and torn with the sharp briers of the wood.
But before this, they had daubed my face and both my hands with a sort of ointment, very pleasant to the smell, which, in a few minutes, removed all the smart of their arrows.