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Overlay   Listen
verb
Overlay  v. t.  (past & past part. overlaid; pres. part. overlaying)  
1.
To lay, or spread, something over or across; hence, to cover; to overwhelm; to press excessively upon. "When any country is overlaid by the multitude which live upon it." "As when a cloud his beams doth overlay." "Framed of cedar overlaid with gold." "And overlay With this portentous bridge the dark abyss."
2.
Specifically: To cover (an object made of an inexpensive metal, glass, or other material) with a thin sheet of an expensive metal, especially with silver or gold. Distinguished from to plate, which is done by a chemical or electrical deposition process.
3.
To smother with a close covering, or by lying upon. "This woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it." "A heap of ashes that o'erlays your fire."
4.
(Printing) To put an overlay on.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Overlay" Quotes from Famous Books



... the circumstance that its whole action is contained in a solitary event, viz., the carrying off of Proserpine from the vale of Henna by Pluto, All the personages, too, are superhuman; and the incident itself supernatural. Claudian's ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and invention. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, and coloured from the inexhaustible resources of the poet's treasury. This is not done with ostentatious pomp, as the hyperbolical heroes of vulgar novelists are painted, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... "Leave me to overlay their cur'osity," answered the ex-mate, or new commodore—"I got my hand in, by boarding six weeks with a Connecticut old maid, once, and I'll defy the keenest ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... dooryard, and the larger structures of several stores. Over all loomed the dark mountain. The sun had just dropped below the ridge down which the road had led them, but still shone clear and golden as an overlay of colour laid against the sombre ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs, and everything worth inventing. Esther absorbed these ideas from the school reading books. The experience of a month will overlay the hereditary bequest of a century. And yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains most ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... partly of stone, was covered with thick matting, and spread upon it were rugs and carpets of Karadagh, Kermanshah, Sultan-abad, and Khorassan, with lesser-known loomings of almost equal beauty. Skins of rare beasts overlay the divans. Furniture of ivory, of ebony and lemonwood, preciously inlaid, gave to the place an air of cunning confusion. There were tall cabinets, there were caskets and chests of exquisite lacquer and enamel, loot of an ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... was contemplated by these hordes of semi-barbarians, the offscouring of society, bred in bar-rooms. Alas! for poor human nature, should this scum ever overlay the surface of American freedom! It would indeed be the nightmare of intellect, the incubus of morality. A commonwealth well managed may be a decent government for an honest man to exist under, but a loaferism, to use a Yankee term, would indeed ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o'clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... creeds of ghost-worshipping barbarians, but not of non-ghost-worshipping savages. A crowd of venal, easy-going, serviceable deities has now been evolved out of ghosts, and Animism is on its way to supplant or overlay a rude early form of theism. Granting the facts, we fail to see how they are explained by the current theory which makes the highest god the latest in evolution from a ghost. That theory wrecks itself again on the circumstance that, whereas the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple: you do not go deep enough—do not penetrate beneath the image's gilt overlay, and see that it covers only worm-devoured wood. Your very comparison tells against you. What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness. And the art which you call ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... satisfy want, which sufficeth Nature, there is no cause to require the superfluities of fortune. For Nature is contented with little and with the smallest things, and, if, being satisfied, thou wilt overlay it with more than needs, that which thou addest will either become unpleasant or hurtful. But perhaps thou thinkest it a fine thing to go decked in gay apparel, which, if they make a fair show, I will admire either the goodness of the stuff or the invention ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... Siberia is more civilized than old Russia; so true is it that it is easier to overlay a new country with civilization than ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... Dust overlay everything. It had not rained in weeks. In the blacksmith shop, diagonally across the street from the hotel, Piney Jackson was shoeing a mule. The mule was invisible, but one knew it was a mule because Piney Jackson has just come out and taken a two-by-four from the woodpile behind ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... gone by, among the furniture and household gear, something is moving. It is an old simpleton with a long bald neck, pink and rough, making you think of a fowl's neck which has prematurely molted through disease. His profile is that of a hen, too—no chin and a long nose. A gray overlay of beard felts his receded cheek, and you see his heavy eyelids, rounded and horny, move up and down like shutters on the dull beads of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... soft hair. groan, a deep sigh. furze, a prickly shrub. grown, increased. gage, to pledge. gall, bile. gauge, to measure. Gaul, old name of France. gate, door; entrance. gild, to overlay with gold. gait, manner of walking. guild, a corporation. gilt, adorned with gold. gloze, to smooth over. guilt, crime. glows, shines. great, large; vast. guest, a visitor. grate, a range of bars. guessed, did guess. grease, soft fat. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... Previous to the attack on Whitehaven, while off Carrickfergus, he had conceived the bold project of running into Belfast Loch, where the British man-of-war Drake, of twenty guns, was at anchor; where he hoped to overlay the Drake's cable, fall foul of her bow, and thus, with her decks exposed to the Ranger's musketry, to board. He did, indeed, enter the harbor at night, but failed after repeated efforts, on account of the strong wind, to get in a proper ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood

... rich colours of the glowing glass, instead of passing through them to heaven's light beyond. To make the senses a ladder for the soul to climb to heaven by, will be perilously likely to end in the soul going down the ladder instead of up. Forms are sure to encroach, to overlay the truth that lies at their root, to become dimly intelligible, or quite unmeaning, and to constitute at last the end instead of the means. Is it not then wise to minimise these potent and dangerous allies? Is it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... press; adjustment of bed and cylinder, form rollers, ink fountain, grippers and delivery systems. Underlaying and overlaying; modern overlay methods. Illustrated; review ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton

... and a bright thistle set their flares of crimson and gold in the green; sowthistle and myosote freaked it with blue; a tall gladiolus, also to be found later by the Aujeh and on Carmel, made pink clusters. Thus did flowers overlay the fretting spikes of our road, and adorn and hide 'the coming bulk ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... by parties of all degrees. In these instances, a little blade of rush is generally neatly inserted round the inner rim of the impression, and evidently must have been so done while the wax was soft. In some instances, these blades of rush overlay the whole seal; in others, a slip of it is merely tied round the label. In delivering seisin under a feoffment, the grantor, or his attorney, handed over to the grantee, together with the deed, a piece of turf, or a twig, or something plucked from the soil, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various

... wife making a book on the course. I bet she'd overlay it and then turn round and back the favourite at a shorter price ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... born out of my mother, generations guided me; My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it, For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long low strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care; All forces have been steadily ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... more than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, and translating phrase after phrase as they passed through his fancy into laughing faces, breezy tresses, and rolling mists. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... that he wishes to make permanently his own. It is easy. It is a matter of habit. If you will you can photograph an idea upon your cerebral gelatine so that neither years nor events will blot it out or overlay it. You must be clearly and distinctly aware of the thing you are putting into your mental treasure-house, and drastically certain of the cord by which you have tied it to some other thing of which you are sure. Unless it is worth your while to do this, you might as ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... he could not fix his attention upon literary matters. He wrote little, not even his journal, as Mrs. Hawthorne has told us, until 1862. Accustomed to respond accurately to every influence about him, with that sensitized exterior of receptive imagination which overlay the fixed substance of personal character,—so that, as we have seen, even a change of climate left its impress on his productions,—it was not strange that the emotions of horror and pain, the passion of hate, the splendid heroism which charged the whole atmosphere about him, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... the beautiful smooth cloth of which his coat was made bad taken on a stinking overlay of crackled black, the German chose to obey Kagig and came leaping back through the fire, and lay groaning on the floor, where the kahveh's owner's seven sons poured water on him by Kagig's order. His burns were evidently ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... The sleeve overlay the man's forearm, and the movement laid bare another bracelet, on the man's right wrist. Size for size, this was the same as the one that had ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... this portrait to any one! If you could know with what a gush of love I have sat losing myself in your eyes, looking at them with rapture during a pause I allowed myself, you would feel as you gathered up the affection with which I have tried to overlay the ivory, that the soul of your little pet ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Overlay" :   cover, protection, protective cover, layer, protective covering, kill, sheathing, ornamentation, overlayer, decoration, ornament, overlie, bed



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