pencil

plural pencils · alternative obsolete pensill

1. A writing utensil with a graphite (commonly referred to as lead) shaft, usually blended with clay, clad in wood, and sharpened to a taper.First known use 16th c.

   Synonyms: lead pencil

2. engineeringAn aggregate or collection of rays of light, especially when diverging from, or converging to, a point.First known use 17th c.

   [T]hey all ran off into the night to the miser’s ruined castle, with its solitary pencil of light in its high turret chamber[.]

   1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 64

3. geometryA family of geometric objects with a common property, such as the set of lines that pass through a given point in a projective plane.First known use 19th c.

   A drillable robot is capable of placing its end link in any orientation in the pencil of planes containing its first link.

   1987, R. E. Trahan, Applied Identification, Modelling and Simulation, page 107

   2 more examples

   When, by the pencil becoming oblique to the surface, the vergency produced on the pencil becomes changed, the primary and secondary focal points, V and H, separate […]

   1863, The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal

   Let l and m be two hyperparallel lines. All the transversals to l and m that form congruent corresponding angles with l and m lie in a pencil.

   2012, G. E. Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane, page 357

4. historicalA paintbrush.First known use 14th c.

   But living art may not least part expresse, / Nor life-resembling pencill it can paynt[…].

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Prologue”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 389

   2 more examples

   why is it not lawfull for every man to pourtray himself with his pen, as it was for him to doe it with a pensell?

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 17, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

   He requested three things of Sir Joshua Reynolds:—To forgive him thirty pounds which he had borrowed of him; to read the Bible; and never to use his pencil on a Sunday.

   1791, James Boswell, Life of Johnson, Oxford, published 2008, page 1390

5. obsoleteraremedicineA small medicated bougie.First known use 19th c.
6. obsoletebiologyA small, thin tuft of hairs or feathers.

   It is almost entirely of a slatey colour, with yellow bill and feet, but the feathers of the rump and upper tail-coverts each terminate in a rigid, glossy pencil or tuft of a vivid crimson.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 431

7. abbreviationellipsisgamblingEllipsis of power of the pencil.

   And most important of all, Cully now had 'The Pencil', that most coveted of Las Vegas powers.

   1978, Mario Puzo, Fools Die

present singular third person pencils · US participle present penciling · UK participle present pencilling · US participle past penciled · US past penciled · UK participle past pencilled · UK past pencilled · alternative obsolete pensill

1. transitiveTo write (something) using a pencil.

   I penciled (BrE: pencilled) a brief reminder in my notebook.

   1 more example

   She had hardly got back when she encountered a piece by Robert Trewe in the new number of her favourite magazine, which must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea, for it contained the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent.

   1888, Thomas Hardy, “An Imaginative Woman”, in Wessex Tales

2. transitiveTo mark with, or as if with, a pencil.

   It pencilled each flower with rich and variegated hues, and threw over its exuberant foliage a vesture of emerald green.

   1852, The Ark, and Odd Fellows' Western Magazine