depict

Formsdepicts, depicting, depicted

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To portray or describe something in words, pictures, sound, or another medium.

   Like holding up a mirror to a scene so others can take it in.

   The mural depicts the city's founding in vivid color.

   These photographs depict the aftermath of the storm in unflinching detail.

   Similarshow, portray, describe, draw, render

   Note

   A verb whose subject is often the work rather than its maker: the mural, the photographs, or, in Lawrence Starr's "Toward a Reevaluation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess" (1984), the well-known words themselves. Older English also let feelings depict themselves. George Borrow, in Lavengro (1851), notices alarm "beginning to depict itself upon her countenance." Modern prose rarely uses that reflexive construction and would simply say the alarm showed.

2. 2
   adjectiveobsolete

   Represented or portrayed in some visual or descriptive form.

   Note

   An adjective without the -ed ending. John Lydgate, early in the 1400s, finds "a lyknesse depict upon a wal." The bare form keeps close to Latin dēpictus, the participle behind Middle English depicten. It is obsolete now. Use depicted instead, the past participle of the everyday verb, which has taken over this job completely.

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