Noun

speck (plural specks)Category:English lemmas#SPECKCategory:English nouns#SPECKCategory:English countable nouns#SPECKCategory:English entries with incorrect language header#SPECKCategory:Pages with entries#SPECKCategory:Pages with 3 entries#SPECK

1. A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.

   a tiny speck of sootCategory:English terms with usage examples#SPECK

   • 1901 [1878], Constance Garnett, transl., Anna Karenina‎, translation of Анна Каренина by Leo Tolstoy:

     Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master.

     Category:English terms with quotations#SPECK

   • 2013 July 20, “Out of the gloom”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:

     [Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.

     Category:English terms with quotations#SPECK

   • a. 1864, Walter Savage Landor, quoted in 1971, Ernest Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor, Twayne Publishers, page 88,

     Onward, and many bright specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the monument of a greater man than I am.

   • 1994, Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, →ISBN:

     Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

     Category:English terms with quotations#SPECK

2. A very small amount; a particle; a whit.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:modicum

   He has not a speck of money.Category:English terms with usage examples#SPECK

   not a speck of truth in her story.Category:English terms with usage examples#SPECK

3. A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeumCategory:Entries using missing taxonomic name (species)#Etheostoma%20stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.

Verb

speck (third-person singular simple present specks, present participle specking, simple past and past participle specked)Category:English lemmas#SPECKCategory:English verbs#SPECKCategory:English entries with incorrect language header#SPECKCategory:Pages with entries#SPECKCategory:Pages with 3 entries#SPECK

1. (transitiveCategory:English transitive verbs#SPECK) To mark with specks; to speckle.

   paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufactureCategory:English terms with usage examples#SPECK

   • 1667, John Milton, “(please specify the page number)”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC:

     Each flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay / Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, / Hung drooping unsustained, […]

     Category:English terms with quotations#SPECK

   • 1728, [James] Thomson, Spring. A Poem, […] A[ndrew] Millar, […]; and G[eorge] Strahan, […], →OCLC, pages 30–31:

     Join'd to Theſe [birds], / Thouſands beſide, thick as the covering Leaves / VVhich ſpeck them o'er, their Modulations mix / Mellifluous.

     Category:English terms with quotations#SPECK

References

Noun

speck (uncountable)Category:English lemmas#SPECKCategory:English nouns#SPECKCategory:English uncountable nouns#SPECKCategory:English uncountable nouns#SPECKCategory:English entries with incorrect language header#SPECKCategory:Pages with entries#SPECKCategory:Pages with 3 entries#SPECK

1. Fat; lard; fat meat.
2. (uncountableCategory:English uncountable nouns#SPECK) A juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.
3. The blubber of whales or other marine mammals.
4. The fat of the hippopotamus.