fog
Pluralfogs (some meanings)
Pluralfogs (some meanings)
- 1A thick cloud that forms close to the ground; also, the dimness and poor visibility it creates.
A bank of fog rolled in off the bay just after sunset.
The hikers lost the trail in the fog and sat on a rock until it thinned.
UsageCommon patterns: thick fog, a bank of fog. Fog rolls in, then lifts or clears.
- 2
- 3To become clouded with condensation, or to cause a surface such as glass to become clouded ('fog up').
My glasses fog the moment I walk into a warm room.
The windshield fogged up as soon as all four of us got into the car.
UsageOften fog up: glasses fog up in a warm room, and breath can fog up a window.
Oppositeclear
- 4A mist or film that clouds a surface.
She wiped the fog from the bathroom mirror with the corner of her towel.
A thin fog on the inside of the windshield made the road hard to see.
Similarmist, film, steam, condensation
- 5
- 6To cover something with fog, or with a fine spray or mist that resembles fog, such as an insecticide.
County trucks fog the neighborhood for mosquitoes every few weeks in summer.
Stagehands fogged the theater just before the curtain rose.
Note
Pest control has made this a working verb: towns fog their streets against mosquitoes, using machines called foggers that ride on trucks, swing from the hand or sit in boats. Greater Winnipeg's Eighth Annual Report (1968) records the city fogged eleven times in a single summer.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 3 facts
- Communities use insecticidal fogging to control mosquitoes. cdc.gov
- Mosquito-control foggers can be truck-mounted or carried by hand. co.monmouth.nj.us
- Foggers can be mounted on boats. desratizador.com
Less common meanings
- 7To become covered with fog, or with something resembling fog.
Low fields near the river often fog over at dawn.
By evening the harbor had fogged in completely, and the ferries stopped running.
UsageOften fog over or fog in. An airport or harbor that is fogged in has thick fog that can disrupt travel.
Similarmist
Oppositeclear
- 8In computer graphics, distance fog: a haze effect that makes objects fade from view the farther they are from the viewer.
The engine adds fog to hide the point where distant terrain stops being drawn.
Turning off fog in the settings reveals mountains miles away, at some cost to the frame rate.
Similarhaze
Note
Graphics programmers use the effect for two jobs at once. It copies the way real air makes distant hills look paler, which gives a scene depth, and it hides the line where the world stops being drawn, so the program can render less of the distance without an abrupt edge.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- Distance fog imitates the atmospheric loss of contrast in distant hills. visionbook.mit.edu
- Fog provides a visual cue to depth. sidefx.com
- Fog conceals the visible boundary of rendered scenery. learn.microsoft.com
- Reducing the distance rendered can improve performance. cvw.cac.cornell.edu
- 9A deposit of silver or another kind of blur on a negative or a developed photograph.
Expired film often shows a faint fog across the whole negative.
The developer was too warm, and the prints came out with heavy fog.
Note
Darkroom workers sort it by source: light fog from stray light, chemical fog from the developer itself, and the faint base fog that even unexposed film carries. Whatever the source, it usually lays a gray veil where the image should be clear and flattens the contrast.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 5 facts
- Stray light causes light fog. 125px.com
- Developer chemicals can cause chemical fog. sprawls.org
- Even unexposed film develops a small amount of fog. kodak.com
- Fog can be uneven or localized, including partial black marks, rather than an even gray veil. ilfordphoto.com
- Fog can reduce contrast, but this is not an inevitable effect of every source or degree of fog. kodak.com
- 10In photography, to make film or a print dim or cloudy, or to spoil it by exposure to stray light; also, to become so.
Leaving the paper in the developer too long will fog the print.
Opening the camera too early fogged the whole roll of film.
Similarcloud
Note
Usually something does the fogging, whether heat, age or careless development, and the film or print is its object, though film can also fog on its own. It reaches beyond light leaking onto film to unwanted density caused by aging, radiation or processing, on negatives and prints alike.
- 11To practice, especially as a lawyer, in a petty or mean way; to pettifog.
Where wouldst thou fog to get a fee?
a. 1701 (date written), John Dryden, “The Counter Scuffle”Note
The verb is the short, scornful core of pettifog: petty, grasping practice, especially in the law. "Where wouldst thou fog to get a fee?" asks a line in The Counter Scuffle. Its origin is unclear, and no link to the weather word is known; an Old Dutch word, focker, has been compared.
- 12The fresh growth of grass that comes up on a field after it has been mowed or grazed.
- 13Tall, decaying grass left standing in a field after the mowing or grazing season is over.
- 14To pasture cattle on a field's aftergrass, or to graze the aftergrass off a field.
- 15To become covered with the kind of grass known as fog.
- 16Moss, the soft green plant that grows in low, thick mats on damp ground, rocks, and trees.
Showing meanings only.
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Origin
Where it comes from is uncertain, though a North Germanic source is likely. Probably it was formed by back-formation from foggy, meaning "thick, marshy, covered with tall grass," which came from the older fog ("tall grass"), or else it comes from or is connected to Danish fog, "spray, drift, shower, storm." In the second case it would be akin to Icelandic fok ("spray, snowdrift") and fjúka ("to blow, drive"), which come from Proto-Germanic *feukaną ("to whisk, blow"), and German fauchen ("to hiss, spit, spray") would be a relative.