plaster
verbEtymology From Middle English plaster, plastre, from Old English plaster, from late Latin plastrum, shortened from Classical Latin emplastrum (“a plaster, bandage”); later reinforced by Anglo-Norman plastre. Displaced native Old English clīþa. The verb is from Middle English plastren, from the noun.
To cover or coat something with plaster; to render.
- to plaster a wall
To apply a plaster to.
- to plaster a wound
To smear with some viscous or liquid substance.
- Her face was plastered with mud.
To hide or cover up, as if with plaster; to cover thickly.
- The radio station plastered the buses and trains with its advertisement.
- If Euston is not typically English, St. Pancras is. Its façade is a nightmare of improbable Gothic. It is fairly plastered with the aesthetic ideals of 1868, and the only beautiful thing about it is Barlow's roof. It is haunted by the stuffier kind of ghost. Yet there is something about the ordered whole of St. Pancras that would make demolition a terrible pity.1941 August, C. Hamilton Ellis, “The English Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 358:
1 more example
- Lillian walked the halls wearing a shirt plastered with what she assured everyone was a memetic stun agent; it looked just like the kill agent gating access to the SCP-001 database file, but as she patiently explained to McInnis, in art, context is everything.2024 September 28, HarryBlank, “Not Ready for Prime Time”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 02 Oct 2024:
Figuratively To bombard heavily or overwhelmingly; to overwhelm (with weapons fire).
- Yeah, if you think that was bad... having, obviously, here, being people in the modern day and knowing something about the historical tactics used at the Battle of Samar, we did have, at one point, the American battleline sailing itself into a rain squall, staying in the rain squall, using large numbers of destroyers (with, obviously, all their smoke generators) to increase the cover in the rain squall and maintain it when the wet squall seemed to start dying off, and, through that, they just went "Right, activate radar, hello everybody, we can see you, you can't see us", and plastered everything in 14-and-16-inch gunfire until everything was broken, burning, and not able to fire back, and then they popped out for the coup de grâce.2019 March 6, Drachinifel, 30:36 from the start, in The Battle of Samar (Alternate History) - Bring on the Battleships!, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2022:
Figuratively To smooth over.
- Derived terms
- court plaster, plasterable, plasterboard, plastered, plasterer, replaster