- present participle of paint.
noun
-
the art or process of applying paints to a surface such as canvas, to make a picture or other artistic composition
-
a composition or picture made in this way
-
the act of applying paint to a surface with a brush
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of painting
Middle English word dating back to 1175–1225; see origin at paint, -ing 1
Explanation
If you want to study painting, go to art school. If that doesn’t work out, maybe you can get a job painting houses. Then you can paint a house purple or paint a picture, which is called a painting. Slapping a coat of paint on your apartment walls is painting, but so is creating a masterpiece like Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or maybe even C.M. Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker.” The picture that results from your painting experiments is also called a painting. The Latin root of painting, pingere, means "to paint," but also "to stain, embroider, or tattoo."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
But Jane, who enters her office to an oil painting of her father, smiling kindly in a maroon armchair, is confident that Sol would have wanted his holdings intact for generations to come.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 5, 2026
Last September, Patricia Kadgien and her husband were charged with concealment and placed under house arrest after a search of her property initially failed to find the painting.
From BBC ● Sep. 4, 2026
GS: What’s your relationship with your other creative outlets, like painting and sculpting?
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2026
And for painting, I didn’t want it to be this well-oiled machine.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2026
“I know you mean well. But I won’t have you reading books and painting pictures and making clever presents for the baby. That will never do.”
From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood
The rock art which the Lost Land Bridge Project has uncovered includes engravings on the cave walls, paintings in ochre and charcoal and line sketches indented into clay and earth by fingertips.
From BBC ● Sep. 4, 2026
Of course, as so many 19th-century paintings capture, left out of this telling is that Orestes’ crimes incur the Furies’ wrath.
From Salon ● Sep. 3, 2026
From her dressing work for the likes of Ye and Don Toliver, to her brooding, textured paintings and sculptural vessels, she conjures beauty into something we can see and touch.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2026
In Longhi’s paintings, Muratov is fascinated by the Venetian culture of the mask: an expression of the city’s “gloomy opulence.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 28, 2026
The straw was piling up in the corners and crawling up the walls, covering the tapestries, the paintings, and the windows.
From "Rump: The (Fairly) True Story of Rumpelstilskin" by Liesl Shurtliff
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
