pigmentation

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — pigment sits at #12,031leans writtentechnical · an editor’s judgement

Pigmentation is the natural colouring of skin, hair, feathers or leaves. The freckles on an arm, the dark stripe down a cat's back.

It is the word doctors and biologists use where the rest of us would say colour. A dermatologist talks about changes in pigmentation; a botanist about the pigmentation of a leaf in autumn. The related noun pigment is the substance itself — melanin is the pigment that gives human skin its pigmentation. You also meet the word in the negative: an animal born with none at all is an albino.

Definitions of pigmentation

1nounpigmentationThe natural colouring of skin, hair or plant tissue.B2
“Sunlight can change the pigmentation of the skin.”
synonyms: colouring

Where it comes from

Latin
pigmentum — pigment
Middle English
pigment
English
pigment
English, today
pigmentation

Built from

pingō · Latin — to paint

From pigment + -ation. pigment comes from Middle English pigment, from Latin pigmentum (“pigment”), itself from pingō (“to paint”) + -mentum; variants of this word may have been known in Old English (e.g. 12th century pyhmentum). a doublet of pimiento and pimento and piment.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

pigmentation in the wild

There is a direct correlation between the geographic distribution of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) and the distribution of indigenous skin pigmentation around the world.
Human skin color
Human hair color is the pigmentation of human hair follicles and shafts due to two types of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin.
Human hair color
Melanism is a congenital high level of melanin in an organism resulting in dark pigmentation.
Melanism
Linea nigra (Latin for "black line"), colloquially known as the pregnancy line, manifests as a linear area of heightened pigmentation frequently observed on the abdominal region during pregnancy.
Linea nigra
Individuals with lighter skin pigmentation tend to exhibit this phenomenon less frequently in comparison to those possessing darker pigmentation.
Linea nigra

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the pingō family

pigment

pigmentation — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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