Other forms: pixels
A pixel is one of the millions of tiny dots that make up an image on a screen. Ten million pixels, a dead pixel, pixel by pixel.
Screen resolution is counted in pixels — 1920 by 1080 means that many across and down — and camera sensors in megapixels, meaning millions of them. A dead pixel is one that has stopped working and shows as a permanent black dot. Pixelated describes an image enlarged until the dots show, and also the deliberate blurring of a face in a photograph. Note pixel art, a style that makes the dots the point.
1nounpixelOne of the tiny dots making up an image on a screen.
“There is a dead pixel in the top corner.”
pixel is a unit of an image.
Pixel is a blend of picture and element, coined by American engineers in the 1960s. Voxel, its three-dimensional cousin, was built the same way from volume, which shows the naming pattern was deliberate.
Built from
pix (“pictures”), + element; often taken to be a blend of “picture” and “element”. The ⟨x⟩ stems from the abbreviation pics being sometimes also written as pix, which has been in use since the 1880s. First attested in 1965.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA