Marbled means veined with swirling lines of another colour. Marbled paper, marbled beef, a marbled endpaper.
In meat the veining is fat inside the muscle, and it is what makes a steak tender and expensive. Marbled paper is made by floating colours on liquid and laying the sheet on top, which is why old book endpapers all look different from one another.
1adjectivemarbledVeined with swirling lines of another colour.
“The old book had marbled endpapers in swirls of blue and red.”
marbled is a pattern.
Ancient Greek
μάρμαρος
Latin
marmor
Old French
marbre
Middle English
marble
English
marble
English, today
marbled
Built from
From marble + -ed. marble Middle English marble, marbre; from Anglo-Norman - and Old French marbre, from Latin marmor, from Ancient Greek μάρμαρος, perhaps related to μαρμάρεος (“gleaming”). The forms from French marma, which had previously been borrowed from Latin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA