Other forms: paintings
A painting is a picture made with colours and a brush. Oil, watercolour or acrylic, on canvas or board.
The word names both the object and the activity, so you can admire a painting and be good at painting. It also covers the far less glamorous kind, since painting the kitchen is a weekend job rather than an art. What separates a painting from a drawing is the medium, since drawing is done with lines. The person is a painter, which likewise means both an artist and a decorator.
1nounpaintingA picture made using paint.~75%
“There was a large painting above the fireplace.”
2nounactivityThe activity of applying paint.~25%
“The painting took three coats and a whole weekend.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old French
peintier
Middle English
peynten
English
paint
English, today
painting
Built from
by surface analysis, paint + -ing. paint comes from Middle English peynten, from Old French peintier. From Middle English peynten, from Old French peintier, paincter, itself from paint, the past participle of paindre, from Latin pingō (“to paint”) (perfect passive participle pictus). Displaced native tēafor, tīefran (“to paint”); and mētan and mǣlan (“to paint, mark with colour”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA