dry plate
Americannoun
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a glass photographic plate coated with a sensitive emulsion of silver bromide and silver iodide in gelatin.
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Metallurgy. tin plate having patches of dull finish.
Etymology
Origin of dry plate
First recorded in 1855–60
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.
Oxymel produced a dry plate that could be kept for days.
From New York Times • Feb. 6, 2014
“You’ll have a new barn in no time,” I said, wiping an already dry plate with a towel.
From "Hattie Big Sky" by Kirby Larson
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Why, I've been using a dry plate, and I think I should have used a wet one.
From Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone or the Picture That Saved a Fortune by Appleton, Victor [pseud.]
So a supersensitive dry plate will often record many thousand stars in a region where the naked eye can see but one.
From Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies by Todd, David Peck
In ordinary wet or dry plate photography these effects would have been reversed, but by Dixon and Gray’s process the relative luminosities of these three colours were almost perfectly translated.
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.