bistre.

1. A brown artist's pigment ranging from yellowish brown to a much darker brown.

2. A brown color with a grayish or yellowish cast.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• a bistre wash
• bistre pigment
• drawing in bistre

On the page

The painter laid a thin bistre wash beneath the figure.

Bistre darkened the recesses of the sketch.

Usage notes

Primary category: sensory / image-rich description. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: Usually uncountable; no ordinary plural in this sense. Commonness: uncommon (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Positive bister full lexical excerpt: standard variant bistre. Yellowish-brown to dark-brown artist pigment; grayish to yellowish-brown color. Accented foreign expression is not being added. Individually checked for a distinct image, texture, sound, taste, smell, visual-perception or artistic function. Definitions/examples are original; sensory strength is not assumed to imply emotion. Writing functions: brown pigment materials, gray-yellow brown palette.