visual
Noun pluralvisuals
Pluralvisuals
- 1Relating to or affecting the sense of sight.
The museum designed a rich visual display for younger visitors.
Visual impairment can make reading small road signs difficult.
Note
Sight is the root of every sense of the word. Middle English vysual came through Old French from Late Latin visualis, "of sight", which was built on Latin visus and the verb videre, "to see". Visage belongs to the same family. Here the adjective concerns the faculty of seeing itself, as in visual impairment. It is gradable, so one design can be more visual than another.
- 2An image, picture, or graphic, especially one used to convey information.
The report's editor swapped the dense table for a single striking visual.
Designers prepared several visuals to accompany the magazine article.
Similarimage, graphic, picture, illustration
- 3The picture and video components of a multimedia presentation, as distinct from the text or the audio.
The concert's visual was as bold as the music, with lasers sweeping the arena.
Reviewers complained that the streaming service compressed the visuals too heavily.
Note
Used in the plural, it names the whole visible side of a film, a game or a concert, set against its sound or its text. A single image is a visual; a production's visuals are everything the audience watches, taken together. Reviewers praise or fault them as one thing, much as they would the soundtrack.
- 4Any part of a work or presentation that is meant to be seen, such as an image or lighting effect.
The stage director treated each lighting cue as a visual worth perfecting.
The app's onboarding leans on simple visuals rather than long instructions.
Note
A broad, countable noun for whatever in a work appeals to the eye, and it often appears in the plural. It can also stretch to images that exist only in the mind. In S. C. Sterling's Teenage Degenerate (2016), a narrator coming off an acid trip is "still seeing visuals dancing around in my head." Context usually makes clear whether the visuals are on a screen or behind the eyes.
- 5A preliminary sketch, especially one showing a proposed design or layout for a project.
The agency pitched three visuals for the holiday campaign.
She sketched a rough visual to show where the headline would sit.
Similarsketch, mock-up, layout, draft
Note
An advertising and marketing term for the rough drawing that comes before the finished work. An agency shows a visual to the client for approval before full production begins. It therefore presents a concept or layout rather than final art: where the headline sits and what the image will be. Unlike a finished picture, it is made to be revised.
- 6An element of a marching band show apart from the marching and the playing of instruments.
The drum major cued the next visual as the brass swelled.
Judges scored the band's visuals alongside its musical performance.
Note
In marching band, a visual is anything on the field that is not marching or playing: flag work, body movement, props. Each such moment counts as a visual in its own right, and a show is built from many of them. In one, the trombones all throw their instruments into the air. The word separates what a show offers the eye from what it offers the ear.
Less common meaning
- 7Able to be seen; visible.
The distant tower was scarcely visual through the morning haze.
No star was visual on that heavily clouded night.
Note
An older use, now obsolete, in which the word described the thing seen rather than the act of seeing. The word has since narrowed to the "of sight" meaning, so a tower called scarcely visual through the haze sounds like a slip today. Write visible instead. When you meet this use in older writing, read it as "perceptible to the eye."
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
It came through Middle English 'vysual' and Old French from Late Latin 'visualis' ('of sight'), from Latin 'visus' ('sight'), from 'videre' ('to see').