Gloss (Verb)
Meaning 1
Give a deceptive explanation or excuse for; "color a lie".
Classification
Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing.
Examples
- She tried to gloss over her absence by claiming she had car trouble, but her boss wasn't fooled.
- The mayor was known to gloss up the city's economic reports to make them look better than they actually were.
- He glossed over the details of his scandalous past to avoid embarrassing his new employer.
- They glossed up the bad news about their flagship product's poor sales by focusing on a recent minor success.
- The politician attempted to gloss over his earlier statement by rephrasing it and downplaying its significance.
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Meaning 2
Provide interlinear explanations for words or phrases; "He annotated on what his teacher had written".
Classification
Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing.
Examples
- Her linguistics professor decided to gloss the passages from ancient dialects in order to help the students understand them.
- The researchers worked tirelessly to gloss the terms they had discovered during their fieldwork in local dialectology.
- As part of her coursework, she had to gloss the text and provide a note on each phrase that was unclear or culturally specific.
- During language documentation workshops, participants were taught how to gloss each phrase on several levels, starting from approximate translations.
- The polyglot lexicographer glossed hundreds of unknown phrases from the extinct language, compiling their meanings into a comprehensive dictionary.
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Meaning 3
Give a shine or gloss to, usually by rubbing.
Classification
Verbs of sewing, baking, painting, performing.
Examples
- Applying polish can help to gloss a pair of dress shoes for a special occasion.
- Use a soft cloth to gloss the surface of the family's antique furniture.
- The detailer spent hours trying to gloss the scratches on the luxury car's finish.
- To gloss the metal surface, gently buff it with a fine-grained sanding block.
- Regular waxing can gloss the finish on a car, making it look newer.
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Meaning 4
Provide an interlinear translation of a word or phrase.
Classification
Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing.
Examples
- The researcher glossed the ancient text to help her colleagues understand its meaning.
- She glossed the specialized terminology to make it more accessible to non-experts in the field.
- A separate section in the essay was dedicated to glossing each of the poet's uses of metaphor.
- The translator attempted to gloss the idiom to convey the idiomatic expression's full significance.
- The scholar provided an interlinear translation, carefully glossing each passage to provide context.