Noun: pencil
| Singular | pencil |
| Plural | pencils |
Sample Sentences
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[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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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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:]
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And most important of all, Cully now had 'The Pencil', that most coveted of Las Vegas powers. [1978, Mario Puzo, Fools Die:]
Nouns inflected like pencil
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Anglo-Norman and Old French pincil (see the variant pincel, which gave rise to Modern French pinceau (“paintbrush”)), from Latin pēnicillum, diminutive of pēniculus (“brush”), itself a diminutive of pēnis (“tail; penis”). Doublet of penis. Not related to pen. See: Latin Nouns '
pēnicillum'.
Verbs referencing "pencil"
Spanish Nouns
pincel, Swedish Nouns
pensel.