/ɡlɒs/, /ɡlɔs/, /ɡlɑs/
OriginProbably from a North Germanic language, compare Icelandic glossi (“spark, flame”), glossa (“to flame”); or perhaps from dialectal Dutch gloos (“a glow, flare”), related to West Frisian gloeze (“a glow”), Middle Low German glȫsen (“to smoulder, glow”), German glosen (“to smoulder”); ultimately from Proto-Germanic *glus- (“to glow, shine”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰel- (“to flourish; be green or yellow”). More at glow.
- uncountable, usuallyA surface shine or luster.
- figuratively, uncountable, usuallyA superficially or deceptively attractive appearance.
“To me more dear, congenial to my heart, / One native charm than all the gloss of art.”
“Hodgson may now have to bring in James Milner on the left and, on that basis, a certain amount of gloss was taken off a night on which Welbeck scored twice but barely celebrated either before leaving ”
- countableA brief explanatory note or translation of a foreign, archaic, technical, difficult, complex, or uncommon expression, inserted after the original, in the margin of a document, or between lines of a text.
“All this, without a gloss or comment, / He would unriddle in a moment.”
“He was a prolific annotator - writing around fifty thousand glosses in as many as twenty manuscripts.”
- countableSynonym of glossary, a collection of such notes.
- countable, obsoleteAn expression requiring such explanatory treatment.
- countableAn extensive commentary on some text.
- US, countableAn interpretation by a court of a specific point within a statute or case law.
“This volume is thus not a narrowly defined treatment of the Code of Professional Responsibility but rather represents a "common law" gloss on it.”
“Judicial Gloss on Test [section title]”
- A definition or explanation of a word sense.
“Dictionary entries comprise two essential parts, the headword ('lemma') and the author's explanation ('gloss').”
“Therefore, for many of the Hebrew words in this book, I have provided more than one gloss (using a slash to separate alternatives, or double slashes when a single slash would be ambiguous), in order t”
- transitiveTo give a gloss or sheen to.
- transitiveTo make (something) attractive by deception
“You have the art to gloss the foulest cause.”
- intransitiveTo become shiny.
- idiomatic, transitiveUsed in a phrasal verb: gloss over (“to cover up a mistake or crime, to treat something with less care than it deserves”).
- transitiveTo add a gloss to (a text).
Formsglosses(plural) · glosses(present, singular, third-person) · glossing(participle, present) · glossed(participle, past) · glossed(past)