Definition of "stipple" []

• To draw, engrave, or paint in dots or short strokes. (verb-transitive)
• To apply (paint, for example) in dots or short strokes. (verb-transitive)
• To dot, fleck, or speckle: "They crossed a field stippled with purple weeds” ( Flannery O'Connor). (verb-transitive)
• A method of drawing, engraving, or painting using dots or short strokes. (noun)
• The effect produced by stippling. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Now, stipple is of course such an easy method that, like all easy methods, it runs to flamboyance; when people have a chance to express themselves they are apt to make all that is inside and that is outside of themselves in one form or another flamboyant, grandiose, and sometimes ridiculously so; but other times it is the expression of the most beautiful things in architecture, especially from the French schools, that one could imagine."
• "Loveliness, and so on, which appeared last year "; and his description of the annuals 'composite art sounds much like a description of" Verses "and its accompanying engraving:" A large weak plate, done in what we believe is called the stipple style of engraving [the stippling in Georgiana."
• "Glass is a master of "stipple" portraits, a technique using tiny dots to simulate facial contours, color and shading."