Meaning

A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt..

Definitions by Sense

1. A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.
2. A very small amount; a particle; a whit.
3. A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.
4. (transitive) To mark with specks; to speckle.
5. Fat; lard; fat meat.
6. (uncountable) A juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.
7. The blubber of whales or other marine mammals.
8. The fat of the hippopotamus.

Example Sentences

a tiny speck of soot

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.

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.

[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.

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.

He has not a speck of money.

not a speck of truth in her story.

paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufacture

Word Forms

• specks
• specking
• specked

Synonyms for speck

Related Words

When Should You Use Speck?

Use speck when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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