Word of the Day Archive
Saturday March 8, 2003
piebald \PY-bald\ , adjective:
1. Having spots and patches of black and white, or other colors; mottled.
2. Mixed; composed of incongruous parts.
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"
Piebald is from pie, the parti-colored bird + bald.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for piebald
