splats

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of splat.

   Heavy raindrops hit the window in fat splats.

   The artist flicked the brush, scattering splats of red across the canvas.

   Note

   One spelling covers several unrelated plurals. In furniture, splats are the narrow wooden pieces at the center of chair backs. After a burst tomato, they are the irregular blobs left on a wall, or the sharp sounds of their landing. In computing slang the word becomes typographic, and a line of splats can mean asterisks or hash symbols. Context, not form, tells them apart.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of splat.

   The water balloon splats against the wall and bursts apart.

   Every snowball splats softly when it strikes the wooden fence.

   Note

   The present-tense verb works in two directions. Used intransitively, a soft thing splats against a surface and spreads out. Used transitively, someone splats paint or mud, much as they would splatter it. Graphics programmers also have a technical use: a program splats textures, layering them through an alpha map so the lower ones show where it is transparent. The same spelling also serves the plural noun.

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