Definition of "daub" in English

noun

1. Excrement or clay used as a bonding material in construction.

2. A soft coating of mud, plaster, etc.

3. A crude or amateurish painting.

verb

1. (intransitive, transitive) To apply (something) to a surface in hasty or crude strokes.

   • The artist just seemed to daub on paint at random and suddenly there was a painting.

2. (transitive) To paint (a picture, etc.) in a coarse or unskilful manner.

   • 1826, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, An Essay on Mind, Book I, in The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1826-1833, London: Bartholomew Robson, 1878, pp. 25-26, If some gay picture, vilely daubed, were seen With grass of azure, and a sky of green, Th’impatient laughter we’d suppress in vain, And deem the painter jesting, or insane.

3. (transitive, obsolete) To cover with a specious or deceitful exterior; to disguise; to conceal.

4. (transitive, obsolete) To flatter excessively or grossly.

5. (transitive, obsolete) To put on without taste; to deck gaudily.

   • 1697, John Dryden, “On the Three Dukes killing the Beadle on Sunday Morning, Febr. the 26th, 1670/1” in John Denham et al., Poems on affairs of state from the time of Oliver Cromwell, to the abdication of K. James the Second, London, p. 148, Yet shall Whitehall the Innocent, the Good, See these men dance all daub’d with Lace and Blood.

6. (transitive, bingo) To mark spots on a bingo card, using a dauber.