graphic

Pluralgraphics

1. 1
   adjective

   Describing or depicting something, especially sex or violence, in vivid and explicit detail.

   The documentary included graphic footage of the battle's aftermath.

   He spared no detail in his graphic description of the surgery.

   Similarexplicit, vivid, gory, lurid, detailed

   Oppositevague

   Note

   Here the picture is made with words or footage. The Greek ancestor also meant "picturesque," and that explains the leap: a graphic account is so vivid you seem to see it. The shift from the "drawn" meaning is a shift from medium to effect. Because the word now leans so heavily toward sex and violence, calling a description graphic often works as a warning rather than as praise.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A computer-generated image displayed on a screen as part of a game, film, or similar production.

   The studio rebuilt every graphic to match the higher screen resolution.

   Players praised the game's detailed graphics and smooth animation.

   Similarvisual, image

   Note

   Screen images almost always come in the plural. People talk about a game's graphics and give them a plural verb: the graphics are amazing. The plural names the overall look of a game or film, and praise or complaint attaches to it as a whole. The singular is rarer in this sense and tends to mean one particular image.

3. 3
   adjective

   Consisting of or relating to drawings, pictures, and other pictorial art.

   The museum's collection focuses on graphic works from the Renaissance.

   Her graphic talents made her a sought-after illustrator for children's books.

   Similarpictorial, visual

   Note

   The root sense, and the one the rest of the word grows from: Latin graphicus, "belonging to painting or drawing," from a Greek adjective that covered painting, drawing and writing alike. Here graphic sorts work by medium rather than by content. Graphic works, graphic talents and graphic art are made by hand and eye, and the word usually sits before the noun it classifies.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A drawing, picture, or other visual illustration.

   The designer added a bold graphic to the magazine's cover.

   The textbook's graphics made the complicated process easy to follow.

   Similarillustration, image, picture, visual, drawing

5. 5
   adjective

   Having a texture resembling writing, typically formed by exsolution, devitrification, and immiscibility in igneous rocks.

   The specimen showed a clear graphic texture across its polished surface.

   Graphic granite displays intergrowths of quartz and feldspar that resemble runic script.

   Note

   A geologist's word that goes straight back to the Greek sense "of or for writing." In graphic granite, quartz and feldspar interpenetrate in angular shapes that look like cuneiform script across a cut face. In this sense the adjective names a texture, so it pairs with rock names and with texture itself. It has nothing to do with the "explicit" meaning.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A moth belonging to the subfamily Melipotini.

   The entomologist netted a graphic feeding on the night-blooming flowers.

   Several graphics were drawn to the trap's ultraviolet lamp after dusk.

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