piebald
Americanadjective
noun
adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of piebald
Explanation
Use the adjective piebald to describe something that has different colored patches — especially black and white patches. If you own a piebald horse, you could name him Spot. The adjective piebald is a combination of pie and bald. Pie was the original name for magpie, a common European bird known for its black and white coloring. Bald did not mean "hairless," but referred to a white patch, especially on the head (think bald eagle). So something piebald has a combination of black and white coloring. It mostly refers to horses, although the word can be used to describe other multicolored things.
Vocabulary lists containing piebald
Animal Farm
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The Downstairs Girl
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The Graveyard Book
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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.
Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance.
From New York Times ● Oct. 7, 2022
A woman presented a piebald English bulldog, the Drake mascot, and Harris gamely crouched on the floor, scratching his belly, till the handler excused him, saying, “He smells food.”
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 15, 2019
In spite of honey-and-gold weather, only 26,623 of Ebbets Field’s 32,500 seats were occupied, and there were wide, piebald patches of untented pews in left field.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 31, 2019
The moose wasn’t an albino either, according to National Geographic, but it had a partial form of leucism called piebald — where only specks of colors remain.
From The Verge ● Sep. 17, 2017
Pigeons could be made to look like roosters and peacocks, and dogs made short-haired, long-haired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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.
