speck

plural specks

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

   a tiny speck of soot

   4 more examples

   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.

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

   [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.

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

   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.

   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.

   1994, Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, →ISBN

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

   He has not a speck of money.

   1 more example

   not a speck of truth in her story.

   Synonyms: ace, atom, thought, atomy, aught, bissel, continental, bit

3. A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.

present singular third person specks · participle present specking · participle past specked · past specked

1. transitiveTo mark with specks; to speckle.

   paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufacture

   2 more examples

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

   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

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

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

1. uncountableFat; lard; fat meat.
2. uncountableA juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.
3. uncountableThe blubber of whales or other marine mammals.
4. uncountableThe fat of the hippopotamus.

plural Specks

1. A surname from German.