Word of the Day

Saturday, March 08, 2003

piebald

\PY-bald\ , adjective;

Having spots and patches of black and white, or other colors; mottled.

Mixed; composed of incongruous parts.

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Quotes:

She remembered the piebald hair of a convicted woman, with brown roots growing through the crude bleach.

-- Jan Dalley, Diana Mosley

The Reverend Joseph A. Burgess drives a station wagon whose make surely could be determined, but the car is so dilapidated--the ornamentation gone and the paint thin and piebald, as if sandblasted--that the vehicle has achieved a perfectly generic identity.

-- Richard Todd, "Faith, Fear, and Farming", Civilization, June 2000

This story happened a long while ago, he said, "in those uncomfortable piebald times when a third of the people were Pagan, and a third Christian, and the biggest third of all just followed whichever religion the Court happened to profess."

-- H. H. Munro (Saki), "The Story of St Vespaluus",

Origin:

Piebald is from pie, the parti-colored bird + bald.