opacity
/ə(ʊ)ˈpasɪti
/noun [mass noun]
1The quality of lacking transparency or translucence: thinner paints need black added to increase opacity...
- The skin of his buildings employs a full palette of optical effects - transparency, translucency, opacity and reflectivity - in a way that seems subtly integrated with the city's structure.
- Speakers at the seminar said increase in lens opacity might lead to blurred vision, sensitivity to light or glare, nearsightedness and distorted images.
- Within these dense geometries, he achieved virtuosic manipulations of optically mixed color, conjuring intriguing tensions between effects of transparency and opacity, flatness and volume.
Synonyms
opaqueness, non-transparency, lack of transparency;
cloudiness, filminess, haziness, mistiness, blur, blurredness, dirtiness, dinginess, muddiness, griminess, smeariness
1.1The quality of being obscure in meaning: the difficulty and opacity in Barthes' texts...
- This is no easy feat, given the difficulty and opacity of Howe's poetry, and Back begins her introduction by addressing this very issue.
- To Hamann, it was obvious that the Age of Reason - which, to his mind, was an age of deepest darkness - required a prose of almost insoluble opacity.
- One indirect effect of this information opacity: spotting price anomalies is difficult at best.
Synonyms
lack of clarity, obscurity, abstruseness, unclearness, density, impenetrability, enigma, unintelligibility, incomprehensibility, reconditeness
Origin
Mid 16th century: from French opacité, from Latin opacitas, from opacus 'darkened'.