| 释义 |
▪ I. dot, n.1|dɒt|
Also 7–9 dott, 7–8 dote.
[Of OE. dott a single instance is known in sense ‘head of a boil’; otherwise the word is not known till 16th c., and not common till 18th c. The OE. word was cognate with OHG. tutto, tutta, mod.Ger. dial. dütte, nipple of the breast; perh. also with mod.Du. dot ‘twirled knot of silk or thread’, but the radical sense is not clear; if *dutto-z, dott, was the source of dyttan to dit, stop up, the original notion might be ‘small lump, clot’.]
†1. The head of a boil. (Only OE.)
c1000Sax. Leechd. III. 40 Ᵹeopeniᵹe mon þonne þone dott, and binde þone cliðan to þan swyle.
2. A small lump, a clot. Obs. or dial.
[1530Palsgrave is cited by Halliwell.] 1570Levins Manip. 176/24 A dot, obstructorium. 1611Cotgr., Cracher vn Iacobin, to spit out a collop, or dot of flegme. Ibid., Glagou..a dot or collop of flegme spet out. 1869Lonsdale Gloss., Dot, a small lump.
3. a. A minute spot, speck, or mark of different colour or material from the surface on which it is.
1674N. Fairfax Bulk & Selv. 25 There being as many things to be known, as there are dotts or points in the outward immensity. 1776Withering Brit. Plants (1796) I. 266 Receptacle globular, or oblong, with hollow dots. 1805Med. Jrnl. XIV. 367 In the measles the rash is composed of circular dots partly distinct, partly set in small clusters. 1861Miss Pratt Flower. Pl. III. 289 Little dots or glands of the leaves.
fig.a1653Gouge Comm. Heb. iii. 4 Unless the hollow dotes of hypocrisie be made plain and even..we can never make up a Temple for God to dwell in.
b. Plastering: (see quots. 1823 and 1874).
c. Mining: (see quot. 1881).
d. Embroidery: (see quot. 1882).
1823P. Nicholson Builder 390 Dots, patches of plaster put on to regulate the floating rule in making screeds and bays. 1874Knight Dict. Mech. I. 722/1 Dots (Plastering), nails driven into a wall to a certain depth, so that their protruding heads form a gage of depth in laying on a coat of plaster. 1881Raymond Mining Gloss., Dotts or Dott⁓holes, small openings in the vein. 1882Caulfeild & Saward Dict. Needlework 154/2 Dot, an Embroidery stitch used in all kinds of fancy work, and known as Point de Pois and Point d'Or.
4. a. A minute roundish mark made with a pen or the like, or resembling one so made.
1748Anson's Voy. iii. ii. 315 A small island..which is represented in the general chart..only by a dot. 1752J. Louthian Form of Process (ed. 2) 184 The Clerk marks with a Dote or Stroke of Ink, the Names of all that do appear. 1821Craig Lect. Drawing vii. 403 Working [engraving] entirely in dots or points. 1843Prescott Mexico (1850) I. 91 The first twenty numbers were expressed by a corresponding number of dots.
b. to a dot: exactly, precisely.
1728Fielding Love in Several Masques ii. ix. 27 La. Trap. Are you blind? they are both alike to a Tittle. Sir Pos. To a dot. Her Hand to a dot. 1839Spirit of Times 9 Nov. 428/3 There were a large number of horses in attendance.., and amongst them were some who had the ‘go along’ in them to a ‘dot’. 1854M. J. Holmes Tempest & Sunshine xv. 215 That was one of Tempest's capers to a dot. 1866Congress. Globe 18 June 3235/3 He understands it to a dot. 1881Ibid. 20 Apr. 356/1 That is the question. That is it to a dot. 1887A. W. Tourgée Button's Inn 189 That'll suit me to a dot. 1924Kipling Debits & Credits (1926) 312 You have it!.. That's him to a dot.
c. the year dot (i.e. a date too old to be particularized), very long ago. colloq.
1895W. P. Ridge Minor Dialogues 166, I reckon he was born in the year dot, that 'orse was. 1928E. Wallace Again Sanders v. 109 He was constantly rediscovering obvious things, or revivifying theories that had been decently interred in the year dot. 1956‘A. Gilbert’ Death came Too xii. 132 It's..the wife who poisons the husband, not some confederate he met in Cuba in the year dot. 1966G. E. Evans Pattern under Plough xiii. 128 ‘That's been the same since the Year Dot when Owd Hinery were an infant’..and..he explained that Owd Hinery was the Devil; ‘and as ‘dot’ comes before 1, the Year Dot was somewhere right back at the beginning’.
d. on the dot: (lit. of the clock-face), punctually, at the precise moment. Also in similar phrases.
1909in Cent. Dict. Suppl. 1923H. Crane Let. 21 June (1965) 137 From the dot of five till two in the morning. 1931A. Christie Sittaford Mystery xxiii. 189 They have no idea what a curse they are to everybody with their punctuality, and everything done on the dot of the minute. 1953W. R. Burnett Vanity Row vii. 58 She's always been very scrupulous about settling her bill on the dot. 1958R. Stout Champagne for One (1959) vi. 75 At six, on the dot as always, Wolfe entered.
e. pl. Originally, the notes on sheet music; hence, written or printed music. slang.
1927Melody Maker June 586, I will give you the ‘dots’ for them. 1956K. Baker in S. Traill Play that Music i. 22 When speaking of jazz, I mean that kind of music that is all spontaneous, fully extemporized, in other words—no ‘dots’. 1968Crescendo Apr. 38/2, I know of not one other guitarist in my home county..capable of playing an arrangement..in a manner that could be termed ‘doing the dots justice’.
5. Specifically: Orthogr.
a. A point used in punctuation; as in the period or full stop (.), or the colon (:).
b. The point over the letters i and j; formerly also over y as a vowel.
c. A point placed over, under, or by a letter or figure to modify its signification, pronunciation, or value.
1740Dyche & Pardon, Dot, a small mark or point, such as is put over an i, or at the end of a sentence. a1771G. Sharpe Method Learn. Hebrew Lang. i. (R.), To express thousands the Rabbins usually place two dots over the units. 1794Wolcott (P. Pindar) Rowland for Ol. Wks. II. 380 On each superfluous letter vents a sigh, and saves the little dot upon an i. 1844Upton Physioglyphics 90 פּ represents P, but פ (without the dot) is equivalent to Ph. 1887Ld. Derby in Pall Mall G. 15 Nov. 14/1 He did not care to put the dots on the i's [see dot v. 1 b], but he said with conviction that the difficulty which Malthus pointed out seventy years ago..was upon us again.
d. Mus. A point placed for various purposes after, over, or under a note, after a rest, or before or after a double bar.
1806J. W. Callcott Mus. Gram. iii. 32 When it is necessary to lengthen a Note by half its value, a dot is placed after it. 1880Grove Dict. Mus. I. 431/1 Notes marked with dots should be less staccato than those with dashes. Ibid. 456/2 Dots following rests lengthen them to the same extent as when applied to notes. Ibid. 457/2 Double Bar..when accompanied by dots indicates that the section on the same side with the dots is to be repeated.
e. Morse telegraphy. (See dash n.1 7 f.)
1838Ann. Electr., Magn., & Chem. III. 146 The numbers consist of nothing more than dots made on the paper, with suitable spaces intervening. Thus ... .. ..... would represent 325. Ibid., The alphabetical signals are made up of combinations of dots and of lines of different lengths. 1859, etc. [see dash n.1 7 f].
f. Television. A picture element in colour television consisting of one of the three primary colours; also, one of the corresponding areas of phosphor on the inside of the tube, which when struck by a beam of electrons fluoresce a particular colour; dot-sequential system, a system of colour television in which dots of the three primary colours are formed in succession as the picture is scanned.
1937Discovery Nov. 329/1 This amount of definition is determined by the number of dot elements into which the picture is arbitrarily divided. 1951Britannica Bk. of Year 617/2 A dot-sequential system..in which the colour is changed for each picture element or dot. 1957Encycl. Brit. XXI. 913/1 The superposition of the colour signal on the brightness signal signifies that areas of the order of a picture element (dots) are reproduced with a repetition rate of only 15 per second. 1959K. Henney Radio Engin. Handbk. (ed.5) xxii. 64 The shadow-mask holes and dots are so positioned that the electron beam from, for example, the green gun can strike only green-emitting dots. 1970Physics Bull. Nov. 515/2 Ciné recordings are made directly from the tv screen picture, with limitations set by phosphor dot size.
6. A little child or other tiny creature.
1859E. Capern Ball. & Songs 174 Right joyous be thy lot..My bonny bright-eyed dot. 1894Sala Lond. up to Date xii. 149 Troops of children, from little dots of four and five..to big girls.
7. The act by which a dot is made by a point striking a surface.
1858Hawthorne Fr. & It. Jrnls. I. 255 He..stumped on with a faster or slower dot of his crutch, according to our pace.
8. Comb., as dot-like adj., dot-maker; dot-and-dash a., formed by dots and dashes, as the Morse telegraph-alphabet, etc.; also transf.; and as v. trans.; dot-etching [cf. 4, quot. 1821], in photolithography, a method of modifying the colour values of a half-tone negative or positive; dot-hole (see sense 3 c); dot-map, ‘a statistical map indicating, by means of dots, the relative frequency of distribution of certain statistical data over a geographical region’ (Webster, 1934); dot matrix Computing, a letter-sized rectangular or square array of positions that are selectively filled to create an alphanumeric character on paper or a VDU screen; usu. attrib.; also ellipt. for dot matrix printer (= matrix printer s.v. matrix n. 7); dot-plant, a plant that stands out as a conspicuous spot of varied colour in a mass of plants; dot-punch = centre-punch; dot-stitch, a stitch used in making dots in embroidery; dot-wheel, a toothed wheel mounted in a handle, which when rolled over a surface produces a dotted line.
1876Preece, etc., Telegraphy (ed. 2) 54 Representing the one signal by a dot (.) and the other by a dash (—), we have the *dot and dash alphabet of Morse. Ibid. 73 Instruments employed in recording the dot and dash signals. 1901G. B. Shaw London Mus. 1888–89 (1937) 396 This was a more sensible system, and less harshly crushing to the singer, than the dot and dash system of using trumpets and drums. 1901W. T. Spencer in Academy 28 Sept. 266/2 Dickens..sat back in his chair, dot-and-dashing telegrams from Fancy-land. 1906Daily Chron. 6 Nov. 3/3 They live in ‘dot-and-dash-land’, in a world of broken utterances, implied confidences, and vague memories.
1948F. H. Smith Photographs & Printer 158 The development of *dot-etching techniques for retouching screen negatives and positives has also helped the trend toward reducing the number of printings used. Ibid., The screen negatives may if necessary be retouched to correct tone and colour values by dot-etching. 1960G. A. Glaister Gloss. of Book 346/1 Retouching, the hand-correcting of colour separations in the photoengraving and photo-lithographic processes. This is known in America as dot-etching. 1968Gloss. Terms Offset Lithogr. Printing (B.S.I.) 19 Dot etching, dot reduction, the chemical removal of silver from the edges of a half-tone dot image.
1895Daily News 4 Apr. 6/1 *Dot-like irregularities.
1923K. G. Karsten Charts & Graphs lvi. 663 *Dot-maps are often most easily made with colored map pins or map tacks. 1939Geogr. Jrnl. XCIII. 274 The printing of the dot-map of the population of Australia gives some wrong impressions in detail.
1975Electronic Design 1 Mar. 76/2 A *dot-matrix printer, the Model 9316, offers speeds to 173 char/s. 1979Sci. Amer. Apr. 120/1 With dot-matrix printing the size and form of the characters themselves can be changed at will. 1982Computerworld 31 Mar. 59/4 If characters formed from dot matrices are too large, the spaces between the dots will become evident and this..interferes with ease of readability. 1982Observer 3 Oct. 21 The dot matrix..is usually cheaper and faster than printers like the daisywheel. 1984J. Hilton Choosing & using your Home Computer 93 The dot matrix method..is very fast and the printers are relatively inexpensive... However, because the letter or number is made up of a series of dots, the print quality tends to be poor. 1985Personal Computer World Feb. 13/2 (Advt.), ThinkJet personal computer printer is surprisingly quiet while printing 150 high quality dot-matrix characters per second.
1882Garden 7 Jan. 7/2 The two last are effective as ‘*dot’ plants in large masses of Pelargoniums or dark-leaved plants.
9. Slang or dial. phr. (to go) off one's dot: (to go) out of one's senses. Cf. dotty a. 2.
1890Yorkshireman 35 (E.D.D.), I have gone Completely off my dot. 1919H. S. Walpole Secret City iii. x. 391 She says he's just goin' off his dot. 1929D. H. Lawrence Pansies 141 And you have to act up like they do Or they think you're off your dot.
▸ a. to connect (also join) the dots and variants: (originally) to draw lines linking numbered points arranged on a page so as to form a picture; (hence fig. and in similes) to integrate discrete elements into a cohesive whole; to make connections between ideas, to draw conclusions.
1915Charleston (W. Va.) Mail 23 Nov. 9/5 To solve the Great Dot Mystery, join the dots with a pencil line... Begin with dot No. 1 and take them in numerical order. 1969N.Y. Times 30 Nov. ii. 15/5 Here is..a tangle of dots and lines like those puzzles we did as children (‘Connect the dots and draw a horse’). 1991Hot Press (Dublin) (BNC) Nov. 32 His first musical experience was as a member of a school tin whistle band..; his first professional job was as singer with an Irish pop showband..and his first solo album was produced by controversial avant-garde composer Philip Glass. Join the dots there, and see what you come up with. 2001New Yorker 16 Apr. 78/2 Connecting sparse dots, Bailey works up a highly plausible account of the master's life and career.
b. connect-the-dots (also join-the-dots): the (children's) activity of linking dots with lines to form a picture; (hence) the integration of discrete elements into a cohesive whole (freq. implying a simplistic or reductive outlook); freq. attrib.
1965Valley News (Van Nuys, Calif.) 9 Dec. 34 b/4 When you do ‘La Boheme’ it's like giving the audience a connect-the-dots puzzle and letting them fill in the lines. 1973Systematic Zool. 22 228/1 Such ‘map areas’ are merely a collection of spots or a portion of the map's surface enclosed by a line drawn though peripheral collecting stations in a free-wheeling game of connect-the-dots. 1987K. Lette Girls' Night Out (1989) 208 Your freckled skin looks like a game of join-the-dots. 1988M. Amis in I. Hamilton Penguin Bk. Twentieth-cent. Ess. (1999) 523 The indentikit, join-the-dots militarist. 1999W. Safire in N.Y. Times 11 Feb. a31/1 The connect-the-dots presentation by the managers to the Senate persuaded most Americans paying attention that the President has..delivered a heavy blow to the sanctity of the oath in courts of law.
▸ Computing. a. A full stop or point as an element of punctuation dividing the different components in an Internet address. Cf. dotcom n.
[1978B. W. Kernighan & D. M. Richie C Programming Lang. 120 The structure member operator ‘.’ connects the structure name and the member name.] 1981S. Sluizer & J. B. Postel Request for Comments (Network Working Group) (Electronic text) No. 780. 21 Another form is four small decimal integers separated by dots and enclosed by brackets, e.g., ‘[123.255.37.321]’, which indicates a 32 bit ARPA Internet Address in four eight bit fields. 1982TCP-IP Digest (Electronic text) 1 xii, It seems to me that userid{at}site.forwarder is much more sensible... [The] at sign is found rarely in userids, and almost never on the arpanet, if at all. Dot is found commonly. 1997J. Seabrook Deeper vi. 209, I asked him where he lived, and he pointed to his head. ‘I'm Barlow at eff dot org.’
b. A particular type of command or file, esp. an operator, that has a name beginning with a dot. Usu. attrib.
1985Austral. Personal Computer Oct. 181/3 In Forth, we use the operator. (dot) to pop the stack. 1990Byte Apr. 349 Another said that the dot commands [in Wordstar] were outmoded, yet dBASE uses them. 1994Internet World (Westport) Jan.–Feb. 62/1 Support staff may also give you a boost onto the system by including the basic ‘dot’ files for account configuration like.login and.cshrc.
▪ II. ‖ dot, n.2|dɒt, dɔt|
[a. mod.F. dot (dot), ad. L. dōt-em dower.]
A woman's marriage portion; the property which she brings with her, and of which the interest or annual income alone is under her husband's control. See also dote n.2, which is the historical Eng. form.
1855Thackeray Newcomes (1879) I. xxxi. 354 (Stanf.) Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot. 1870H. Smart Race for Wife ii, There would, perhaps, be some little difficulty about the dot. 1882Mrs. J. H. Riddell Pr. Wales's Garden-Party 37 She had a dot of three thousand pounds, which..brought in under a hundred a year.
▪ III. dot, v.1|dɒt|
[f. dot n.1]
I.
1. a. trans. To mark with a dot or dots; to make a dot or dots on. dot in, to fill in with dots.
1740Dyche & Pardon, Dot, to mark with small points, as engravers do to express Or in Heraldry. 1776G. Semple Building in Water 87 A third Plate..which you see dotted out. 1811Self Instructor 524 To imagine that the picture was entirely dotted in. 1852Alford in Life (1873) 211 The choice geraniums are where I have dotted my plan.
b. To put the dot (·) over the letter i or j. to dot the i's (fig.): to fill in the particulars, to particularize minutely.
1849Thackeray in Scribner's Mag. I. 557/1 I have..dotted the i's. 1865Cornh. Mag. Aug. 254 None of the i's are dotted, the dot being first used towards the end of the fourteenth century. 1885Manch. Exam. 15 June 6/2 Improving the interval..to dot his i's and cross his t's. 1896Daily Chron. 20 Apr. 4/7 [He] dotted our ‘i's’ and crossed our ‘t's’ with a vengeance about the lack of men in the Navy.
2. To cover or diversify as with minute spots.
1818J. Marsden Amusem. Mission. (ed. 2) 42 These em'rald isles, that Ocean's bosom dot. a1859Macaulay Hist. Eng. V. 53 The whole Channel was dotted with our cruisers. 1868Morris Earthly Par. I. 171 Meadows green Dotted about with spreading trees.
fig.1853J. Cumming Foreshadows ix. 242 Her nation's history was dotted with judgements from the Lord.
3. To place like dots at separate points on a surface; to scatter like dots or specks.
1816Keatinge Trav. (1817) II. 25 Domestic fowls [were] dotted here and there through the other groups. 1858Lady Canning in Hare Two Noble Lives (1893) II. 464 The staff are dotted about by twos in different bungalows. 1868Morris Earthly Par. I. 364 All about were dotted leafy trees.
4. To write down compendiously; to jot down.
1773[see dotting vbl. n. 2]. 1845Ford Hand-bk. Spain i. 58 One word dotted down on the spot is worth a cart-load of recollections. 1860Thackeray Round. Papers, Screens in Din. Rooms (1876) 60, I had an amiable companion close by me, dotting down my conversation.
5. To hit, strike; esp. in phr. to dot (a person) one. slang.
1895W. P. Ridge Minor Dialogues 166 I'll dot you one..if you don't keep that mouth of yourn ―. 1896W. W. Jacobs Many Cargoes 239 Put your dooks up... I'm going to dot you! 1912A. M. N. Lyons Clara xxi. 237 Some of us might dot you one. 1936Wodehouse Laughing Gas xx. 222 This brace of thugs arguing and disputing as to which should have the privilege of dotting me. 1951J. B. Priestley Festival at Farbridge 348 Any monkey tricks an' I'll dot yer one.
6. intr. To make a dot or dots. See next.
1755–73Johnson, Dot, to make dots or spots.
II. The verb-stem in comb.
1. dot and carry (one).
a. A schoolboy's expression in some processes of elementary arithmetic (subtraction, division, and addition). Hence, a name for such process; also for one who does calculations or teaches elementary arithmetic.
1785Grose Dict. Vulg. Tongue, Dot-and-carry-one, a writing master or teacher of arithmetic. 1822Scott Nigel v, You old dotard Dot-and-carry-one that you are. 18..Lowell Didactic Poetry Poet. Wks. 1890 IV. 226 The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry.
b. humorously = 2. Also fig. and transf.
1841Leman Rede 16 String Jack i. iv, (Farmer) Of all the rummy chaps I ever did see, that dot-and-carry-one of old poetry is the queerest. 1883Stevenson Treas. Isl. iv. xvi, I know my pulse went dot and carry one.
2. dot and go one. An expression representing the limp of a person lame of one leg, or who has a wooden leg which makes a ‘dot’ on the ground for each step that the other goes. Used subst. for the action, and for the person; and as adj. and adv., qualifying either. Also fig. and transf.
1772Nugent tr. Hist. Friar Gerund I. 130 The Dot-and-go-one of whom we are speaking. 1773F. Burney Early Diary 2 Oct., The attentive kind husband, who..prefers a dot-and-go-one with his wife to the fiery coursers without. 1840Barham Ingol. Leg., Lay St. Nicholas lviii, He rose with the sun, limping ‘dot and go one’. 1861T. A. Trollope La Beata I. viii. 188 The laborious dot-and-go-one walk occasioned by his lameness. 1881J. Hawthorne Fort. Fool i. xx, The conversation..hobbled along in the discontinuous, dot-and-go-one fashion that conversations sometimes affect.
▪ IV. dot, v.2 rare.
[ad. mod.F. doter, after dot n.2 The historical Eng. form was dote v.2]
trans. To dower (a bride) with a marriage portion.
1887E. D. Gerard Land beyond Forest (1888) II. 94 The empress undertook to dot every young gipsy girl who married a person of another race. |