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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



... 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

... set his imperial seal above their portal, and she, Caterina, was to lead them all in the honor she was bringing upon her country! If her own estimate of the part she was to play was a foolish one, only a Venetian patrician maid could comprehend the glamour that overlay this vision of Caterina's—the royal delivery from bondage—the unknown delights it must open ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... can an intense fixity of perception upon every fact or word or date 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 ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... and grows impatient and absent)—he moves in an unmanageable procession of facts and proofs, instead of coming to the point at once—and his premises (so anxious is he to proceed on sure and ample grounds) overlay and block up his conclusion, so that you cannot arrive at it, or not till the first fury and shock of the onset is over. The ball, from the too great width of the calibre from which it is sent, and from striking against such a number of hard, projecting points, ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various

... was the recent overlay of his own generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... old-style vinyl record involved cutting grooves in a stamping die with a precision lathe. More mundanely, the dominant technology for mass duplication of paper documents in pre-photocopying days involved "cutting a stencil", punching away portions of the wax overlay on a silk screen. More directly, paper tape with holes punched in it was an ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... cataracts of them poured down the walls, stopped, and shied off as I looked at them, and began to go it again when I lowered my eyes. Occasionally the figures 20 would take shape somewhere about the floor, and then the figures 980 would slide up and overlay them. Then, like the lean kine of Pharaoh's dream, they would all march away and devour the fat naughts of the number 1,000. And dancing like gnats in the air were myriads of little caduceus-like, phantoms, thus—$$$$$. I could not at all make it ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... been before her fall. Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace in the forest of towers those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold,[12] cleanse from their pollution those choked canals which are now the drains of hovels, where they were once vestibules of palaces, and fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him withdraw from this scene, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... toils, and raged. The man knew what they were, who heretofore 90 Had seen the like lie murder'd on the shore; By the wild fury of some tempest cast, The fate of ships, and shipwreck'd men, to taste. As careless dames, whom wine and sleep betray To frantic dreams, their infants overlay: So there, sometimes, the raging ocean fails, And her own brood exposes; when the whales Against sharp rocks, like reeling vessels quash'd, Though huge as mountains, are in pieces dash'd; Along the shore their dreadful limbs lie scatter'd, 100 Like hills with earthquakes shaken, torn, and ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... in a heavy overcoat, his hands in thick gloves, walked from his door into the street. The cold straightened him. The deserted night mirrored itself in a thin coating of snow that overlay ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht

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

... modifications of time. Even to the wickedness of the German princes would presently be added some conflicting aspects. Could Letty keep things for years in her mind, hard and terrible, as they were now? Surely they would soften; other things would overlay them.... ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... celestial symphony; nor are they capable of 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

... 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 ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... 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 ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... the steady sledge, Smites the shrill anvil all day long. Sprinkle the furrow's even trace For those whose toiling hands uprear The roof-trees of our swarming race, By grove and plain, by stream and mere; Who forth, from crowded city, lead The lengthening street, and overlay Green orchard-plot and grassy mead With pavement of the murmuring way. Cast, with full hands the harvest cast, For the brave men that climb the mast, When to the billow and the blast It swings and stoops, with fearful strain, And bind the fluttering ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... the question of this web is disposed of, we wonder who drew all these figures of men and horses, for Queen Matilda and her ladies to overlay with stitchery, and why his name has not come down to us. We decide within our minds, for it never occurs to us to impute such ability in drawing to the Queen or her ladies, that it was the work of some monkish brother who varied his illuminating labor upon missals and copies of the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... 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. hale, sound; healthy. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... polish of progress may not too much overlay the solid if humble virtues which procured that character for her class. Some efforts are being made here and there to direct the course of young girls after leaving the village schools—to put them in the right way and give them the benefit of example. As yet such efforts are confined ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... reigned supreme. Naturally, it was not the fault of the child that she had taken on so quickly the colour of her environment; nor, fortunately, was it too late to overlay those traits with other and more pleasing characteristics. But thinking of the soft-eyed, gentle, loving Italian girl he had married, Roger resolved that her child should have another chance before it was too late; and with that object in mind ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... 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 painful, but not nearly so serious ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... slope, he could make out several other scattered houses, each with its 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 pines on ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... hate an' appetite, an' they stretch out an' feel, stretch out an' feel, with them hundred arms, till they git what they want, an' then they lay hold with all the suckers on them hundred arms, an' clutch an' wind, an' twist an' overlay, till, whether it's a drownin' sailor or a ship, you can't ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... mouth tightened and her brow clouded. "I've had my problems too, but I always made quick work of them. They never had a chance to overlay me like a mother overlays her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... seem to have been succeeded by a race of men using tools, implements, and ornaments of bronze. In some places the remains of this bronze period directly overlay those of the stone period, showing the latter to have been the most ancient; but in others, the village sites are altogether distinct. The articles with which the metal implements are intermixed, show that considerable progress had been made in the useful arts. The potter's wheel ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... 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. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... race of men; but a perfectly fixed quantity annually, not increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you may gather it; you may let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in the sands, or you may make kings' thrones of it, and overlay temple gates with it, as you choose: but the best you can do with it is always merely sifting, melting, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... slopes were notably easier on the eastern, and more abrupt on the western side. The people had sunk several pits in places likely to yield 'kindly quartz,' and they had made no mistakes as to the overlay of the lode, its ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... incarnation of Scaramouche. But sufficiently was he so ever to mask his true feelings by an arresting gesture, his true thoughts by an effective phrase. He was the actor always, a man ever calculating the effect he would produce, ever avoiding self-revelation, ever concerned to overlay his real character by an assumed and quite fictitious one. There was in this something of impishness, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of their research. Over and above ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... of the earth; their huge crystals of mica, quartz, hornblende, feldspar, and other minerals could never have been formed except under a blanket of rock which almost prevented the original magmas from cooling. The thousands or tens of thousands of feet of rock which once overlay the schists and still more the granites and gneisses must have been slowly removed by erosion, for there was no other way to get rid of them. This process must have taken tens of millions of years, and yet the whole work ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... course, through might of seas we drive, 200 Nor e'en might Palinurus self the day from night-tide sift, Nor have a deeming of the road atwixt the watery drift. Still on for three uncertain suns, that blind mists overlay, And e'en so many starless nights, across the sea we stray; But on the fourth day at the last afar upon us broke The mountains of another land, mid curling wreaths of smoke. Then fall the sails, we rise on oars, no sloth hath any place, The eager seamen toss ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away,—its unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct, revelling in Art like children in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to science,—all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory, as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... their legends, young man!" said Bardo, interrupting Tito impetuously. "It is enough to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was trodden by philosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms of besotted fanatics ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... done with her is to leave her only a poor creature—to strip her of the conceit and malice with which her mother would overlay her feeble intellect. This sounds deplorably enough; but, as parents will not speak the plain truth to themselves about their charge, governesses must. There is, perhaps, little better material in Fanny: ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... sights as these, as I have more than once repeated, requires to be diligently sought for, and extricated from many things which overlay or mar it, throughout nearly the whole of Florentine Renaissance painting. But by good luck there is one painter in whom we can enjoy it as subtle, but also as simple, as in the hills and mountains outlined by sunset or gathered ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

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

... 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 not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... had planted colonies in every corner of 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

... topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled, Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned, Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled First out of, and then back again to chaos— The superstratum which will overlay us.[jd] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... across the face of Central Europe; and on its bottom was deposited the soft ooze of globigerina shells and siliceous sponge skeletons which has now hardened into chalk and flint. A great cretaceous sheet thus overlay the Wealden beds and the whole face of Sussex to a depth of at least 600 feet; and if it had not been afterwards worn off in places, as the nursery rhyme says of old Pillicock, it would be there still. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... Palestine and in the Hollow Vale of Syria. A small poppy 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 ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... songs to a heavy heart which will make an effervescence 'like vinegar on nitre,' when they say to us, 'Be of good cheer.' How can I be glad if there lie coiled in my heart that consciousness of alienation and disorder in my relations to God, which all men carry with them, though they overlay it and try to forget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy of a man except that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the heart, and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... which is of God by faith," he grew hopeful, happy, and strong. Here is a living seed, but it is very small an awakened, exercised, conscientious, believing monk, is an imperceptible atom which superstitious multitudes, and despotic princes, and a persecuting priesthood will overlay and smother, as the heavy furrow covers the microscopic mustard-seed. But the living seed burst, and sprang, and pierced through all these coverings. How great it grew and how far it spread history tells to-day. We have cause ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... that past Georgian day, When men were less inclined to say That "Time is Gold," and overlay With toil their pleasure; He held some land, and dwelt thereon,— Where, I forget,—the house is gone; His Christian name, I think, was John,— His ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... across the cabin at the big map of the United States, with its red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions, and the transparent overlay on which they had plotted their course. The red line started at Fort Ridgeway, in what had once been Arizona It angled east by a little north, to Colony Three, in northern Arkansas; then sharply northeast to St. Louis and its lifeless ruins; then Chicago and Gary, where little ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... Each with its farm-house builded rude, By English yeoman squared and hewed, And the grim, flankered block-house bound With bristling palisades around. So, haply shall before thine eyes The dusty veil of centuries rise, The old, strange scenery overlay The tamer pictures of to-day, While, like the actors in a play, Pass in their ancient guise along The figures of my border song What time beside Cocheco's flood The white man and the red man stood, With words of peace and brotherhood; When passed the sacred calumet From lip ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... with a laugh. "Don't overlay your yarns like that. We've certainly had a bit of a blow, but I've seen it much worse ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... perhaps is as good as anything else; and, seeing it has once become established and fixed in the way it has, I think it ought no more to be disturbed than men's faith in their political institutions. Our concern should be, merely to regulate it, that it grow not too large, and so overlay and crush the state. Fanatics and bigots must be hewn away. There must be an occasional infusion of doubt and indifference into the mass, to keep it from fermenting. You cannot be offended, Lucius, at the way in which I speak of your new-adopted faith. I think no better of any ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware



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



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