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See also: Speck



Etymology 1[edit]

From Old English specca (small spot, stain).


speck (plural specks)

  1. (countable) A tiny spot, especially of dirt etc.
    a tiny speck of soot
    • 2013 July 20, “Out of the gloom”, The Economist, volume 408, number 8845: 
  2. (uncountable) A juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.
  3. A very small thing; a particle; a whit.
    He has not a speck of money.
    • a. 1864, Walter Savage Landor, quoted in 1971, Ernest Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor, Twayne Publishers, page 88,
      Onward, and many bright specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the monument of a greater man than I am.
  4. A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma (Doration) stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.


speck (third-person singular simple present specks, present participle specking, simple past and past participle specked)

  1. (transitive) To mark with specks; to speckle.
    paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufacture
    • 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1991, Stephen Orgel, ‎Jonathan Goldberg (editors), The Major Works, 2003, paperback, page 534,
      Each flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay / Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, / Hung drooping unsustained,

Etymology 2[edit]


speck (uncountable)

  1. The blubber of whales or other marine mammals.
  2. The fat of the hippopotamus.