Other forms: silhouettes, silhouetted
A silhouette is the dark shape a thing makes when the light is behind it: outline only, no detail. A cat on the window ledge against an evening sky. Two people at the far end of a lit corridor. The hills turning black as the sun drops behind them.
It works as a verb, and almost always in the passive — a figure silhouetted against the doorway. Away from any lamp it means the outline of a thing in general: the silhouette of a dress, the silhouette of a car, a building you could name from its silhouette alone. In silhouette is the fixed phrase, and a portrait done in silhouette is a head in flat black paper cut out with scissors, which is what the word first meant. Watch the spelling, because it came in from French whole and kept every letter: an h you never hear, and -ouette on the end.
1nounsilhouetteA dark shape seen against a lighter background.~58%
“The cat sat in the window, a black silhouette against the sky.”
2verblookTo show something, or to appear, as a dark outline against light. Nearly always passive.~2%
“Two figures were silhouetted at the end of the corridor.”
3nounoverallThe outline or overall shape of something, especially a body or a piece of clothing.~28%
“That coat gives you a completely different silhouette.”
4nounportraitA portrait of somebody's profile cut from black paper.~12%
“A row of family silhouettes hung along the stairs.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 149 sentences found in the wild and placed 117 of them on a sense (32 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
SIL-houette → a SEAL
The sun is going down behind the rock and a seal lifts its head. All you can see of it now is a black shape cut out of an orange sky — two round ends and no face at all.
hooks ontoseal
There is a man inside this word. Étienne de Silhouette (1709–1767) was France's Controller-General of Finances, and English took his surname whole and handed it to a shape. Why it attached to him was being argued over while the word was still new, and the dictionaries list the suggestions to this day without picking one.
French
silhouette
English, today
silhouette
From silhouette. The is a French silhouette, from the surname of Étienne de Silhouette (1709–1767), France’s Controller-General of Finances. It has been suggested that the word refers to one or more of the following:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA