speck

noun

1. 1

   A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.

   a tiny speck of soot

   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.

   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.

2. 2

   A very small amount; a particle; a whit.

   He has not a speck of money.

   not a speck of truth in her story.

3. 3

   A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.

verb

1. 1

   To mark with specks; to speckle.

   paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufacture

   Each flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay / Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, / Hung drooping unsustained, […]

   Join'd to Theſe [birds], / Thouſands beſide, thick as the covering Leaves / VVhich ſpeck them o'er, their Modulations mix / Mellifluous.

noun

1. 1

   Fat; lard; fat meat.

2. 2

   A juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.

3. 3

   The blubber of whales or other marine mammals.

4. 4

   The fat of the hippopotamus.

Forms

plural

specks

past tense

specked

past participle

specked

present participle

specking

third person singular

specks