transparency
Pluraltransparencies (some meanings)
- 1Openness about actions and decisions; the condition of being accessible to scrutiny.
The new CEO pledged greater transparency in the company's hiring practices.
Critics argued that the agency's transparency had declined under the new administration.
Similaropenness, candor, accountability, frankness
Oppositesecrecy, opacity, concealment
Note
Openness in public life is the figurative heir of the physical quality: an institution with transparency lets outsiders see what it does. Like the physical sense, it takes no plural. It often marks a contrast between eras. Howard Johnston, writing in RAIL in 2023, imagines politicians of an earlier time who would have been summarily sacked "in this present age of transparency."
- 2The quality of being transparent; the degree to which a material allows light to pass through it.
Engineers tested the glass for transparency before installing it in the cockpit.
The gemstone's exceptional transparency makes it especially valuable to collectors.
Similartransparence, transparentness
Oppositeopacity, opaqueness
Note
The physical quality is where the word starts. It was borrowed from Medieval Latin trānspārentia, and the other meanings build on it. In this sense it is uncountable: glass has more or less transparency, never two transparencies, because the plural belongs to the see-through objects themselves. Transparence and transparentness mean the same thing but are uncommon, so transparency is the form to use in ordinary writing.
- 3A sheet of translucent film bearing an image, designed to be viewed by shining light through it.
The photographer held each transparency up to the light to check the exposure.
Before digital slides, lecturers wrote their notes on transparencies for the overhead projector.
Note
The photographer's version is made by a camera or printer rather than a brush, which sets it apart from the painted kind. The image is a positive on a film base and is read by transmitted rather than reflected light, which is what separates a transparency from a print. The term covers both mounted slide film and the acetates once laid on overhead projectors.
- 4An artwork made on a transparent surface, intended to be viewed with light shining through it.
The gallery displayed a backlit transparency that shifted in color as visitors walked past.
Nineteenth-century celebrations often featured painted transparencies illuminated from behind by lamps.
Note
Public celebration was the natural home of these pictures. The silversmiths Rundell and Bridge displayed Thomas Stothard's large transparency, painted in thin oils on canvas and lit from behind, outside their house on Ludgate Hill. In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Ethel Churchill (1837), characters set off to see a transparency of their majesties flanked by Bellona and Peace. Here the word is countable: a transparency, painted transparencies.
- 5Any object or layer that is transparent; something that can be seen through.
In the diagram, the outer shell is drawn as a transparency so the inner parts remain visible.
Each transparency in the stacked display lets the layer beneath show through.
Similaroverlay
Note
Almost anything one sees through can be called a transparency, including, figuratively, a person or character with nothing inside. H. W. Seng, reviewing fiction in 1986, calls John Lehmann's narrator Jack Marlowe "such a transparency," meaning a figure the reader looks straight through. The same review links that thinness to formless fiction.
- 6Sufficient accuracy in compression that the result is perceptually indistinguishable from the uncompressed original.
Listening tests suggested the codec achieved transparency at higher bitrates.
For archival work, engineers prefer lossless formats over relying on the transparency of lossy compression.
Note
Audio and video engineers use the word as a pass mark for lossy compression. A codec reaches transparency when listeners or viewers, in controlled blind comparison, cannot reliably tell its output from the uncompressed source. That is not the same as lossless: data is still discarded, but no artifact is detectable by human perception. The judgment usually attaches to a setting, as in transparency at a given bitrate.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from the Medieval Latin word trānspārentia.