mottle
Other forms: mottled; mottles
To mottle is to speckle or dapple with dots. An artist might mottle a canvas by dripping splotches of paint on it.
You can also use mottle as a noun, for a patchy arrangement of color or light: "The dog's fur was a mottle of brown and black." The adjective mottled is more common than mottle for describing things marked with spots or blotches, and both words come from motley, which today means "mismatched" but was originally defined as "multicolored."
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mark with spots or blotches of different color or shades of color as if stained
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color with streaks or blotches of different shades
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an irregular arrangement of patches of color
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Copy citationVocabulary lists containing mottle
Named after a long line of men in his family, twelve-year-old Andrew Joseph Tyler visits his ancestral home in Missouri and gets transported back in time.
After learning that her blood is gold instead of red, sixteen-year-old Deka is forced to fight for the emperor of Otera by joining the alaki — an army of nearly immortal girls with golden blood and superhuman gifts.
A young sailor washes up on the shore of a remote island where the people pray for shipwrecks and scavenge the wreckage.
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