1617 J. Woodall Surgions Mate Termes 344 The head of the vppermost [pot] being very well couered and luted, but his bottome boared full of little pin-holes.

1676 R. Wiseman Severall Chirurg. Treat. i. iv. 28 The Breast had at first broke..in a small pin-hole.

1712 E. Freke Diary 20 Sept. in Jrnl. Cork Hist. & Archaeol. Soc. (1913) 19 86 Infuse..In A quarte of the beet sack In A..Pott Covered with A Blader pricked full of Pin Holles.

1749 T. Short Gen. Chronol. Hist. Air I. 477 I found my Garden full of a second Brood of the Pinhole Caterpillars, especially the Currants.

1822 T. Webster Imison's Elem. Sci. & Art (new ed.) I. 233 We can easily see through a small pin-hole in a piece of paper.

1897 T. C. Allbutt et al. Syst. Med. III. 880 The orifice of the appendix..may be a mere pinhole.

1922 T. M. Lowry Inorg. Chem. xxi. 240 In the Bunsen Burner..coal-gas is admitted through a narrow pin-hole in a nipple at A.

1997 Guardian 17 June (Educ. section) 11 The alidade was rotated until the rays passed through a pinhole in the top end.

1867 V. G. Bloede Reducer's Man. iii. 39 It is customary to saturate the solution of nitrate of silver with an iodide or a bromide to prevent the blemishes upon the plate known as pinholes.

1909 Jrnl. Industr. & Engin. Chem. May 295/1 Dealers who were previously large importers of tin plate..are willing to admit that even in the ‘good old times’ they were greatly annoyed by the so-called ‘pin holes’ in their goods.

1970 J. A. Scarlett Printed Circuit Boards iv. 53 Most firms use Beta-ray backscatter tests to check thicknesses of gold plating, together with an electrograph porosity test against pinholes.

2003 Pract. Fishkeeping Aug. 33/1 Varnishing is not the answer for even a missed ‘pinhole’ will allow water to get in and cause the varnish to blister.

1892 Science 29 July 64/2 The timber beetles enter directly through the bark, making their ‘pin-hole’ tunnels in all directions through the wood.]

1894 A. D. Hopkins in Bull. West Virginia Agric. Exper. Station Jan. 291 In order that we may refer to the different kinds of defects caused by insects, by some simple, descriptive names, I will present the following, provisional classification and popular names. Pin Holes. Small, round holes, one-hundredth of an inch to one-fourth of an inch in diameter.

1938 G. M. Hunt & G. A. Garratt Wood Preservation iii. 53 The insect defects produced in wood..may be classified as pinholes or grub holes, the distinction being principally a matter of size.

1962 C. L. Metcalf & W. P. Flint Destructive & Useful Insects (ed. 4) 846 The ambrosia or timber beetles tunnel into the sapwood and heartwood.., making ‘pinholes’ upon which they propagate fungi as food.

1990 D. Bolger Journey Home (1991) ii. 63 It was musty in the chalet, the spartan furniture riddled with the pinholes of woodworm.

1906 H. Adams Cassell's Engineers' Hand-bk. iv. 174 Pin-holes, or blow-holes in brass castings are produced by overheating the metal.

1947 J. C. Rich Materials & Methods Sculpt. iv. 70 The most common surface blemishes that may mar an otherwise perfect cast are caused by pinholes resulting from air bubbles imprisoned in the plaster mix.

1968 D. R. Cliffe Techn. Metall. xi. 268 ‘Gas holes’ (or ‘pin-holes’) are small, evenly distributed rounded cavities with bright walls caused by the release of dissolved gases during freezing.

2001 Mod. Casting (Nexis) 1 Sept. 29 During solidification, the dissolved gases will precipitate into tiny bubbles of gas, forming pinholes in the casting.

1976 Broadcast 29 Nov. 18/1 The camera is a box—be it a still camera, a film camera, a television camera, a Polaroid, a pinhole.

1981 J. Monaco How to read Film (rev. ed.) ii. 60 Flexible film has replaced the drawing paper as the ‘screen’ upon which the image falls [in a camera]; but the greatest changes have taken place in the pinhole.

2004 South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) 21 Mar. (Review section) 6/2 The original pinholes of the 19th century were adaptations of the camera obscura.