morph1
/mɔːf
/verb
1Change smoothly from one image to another by small gradual steps using computer animation techniques: [with object]: the characters can be morphed on screen...
- Mortis knew she was caught when the small cat smoothly morphed into a woman.
- The image morphed to show a snow covered street, facing some kind of large store.
- It shows a kite morphing into a ship that sails from a river to the sea and changes into a magnificent galleon, then back into a kite.
1.1Undergo or cause to undergo a gradual process of transformation: [no object]: the cute moppet has morphed into the moody moll of the indie world...
- We have over 400 pages which are constantly morphing.
- I don't think they get enough credit for what they have morphed into.
- The three actors all deliver superb performances morphing between characters with seamless ease.
noun
1An image that has been morphed.The sounds ushering from the two morphs on the screen weren't any better, though, and he couldn't block those out....
- The digital morph can also play an important role in the sound dimension of the text.
1.1An instance of morphing an image.A discrete morph can be thought of as an animation starting from the initial object and ending with the final object after a given number of the intermediate objects....
- Loop format is especially suitable in the case of the author using digital morphs to program a text so that it progresses from one verse to another.
- There's some stunning works, and an intriguing computer morph that shows how depictions of the Lord's face have changed over time.
Origin
1990s: element from metamorphosis.
metamorphosis from Late Middle English:
Metamorphosis came into English via Latin from Greek metamorphoun ‘transform, change shape’. It was introduced from the Metamorphoses, a large collection of verse stories by Ovid (43 bc– ad 17 or 18), about transformations of gods and mortals into the shapes of objects, plants, or animals. In the 1980s morph, derived from metamorphosis, came to be used in computer animation for the merging of one image into another, although the idea was already familiar to young television viewers in the UK from the character of Morph, a stop-motion plasticine character created by Aardman Animations from 1977, who would mutate in the same way.
Rhymes
morph2
/mɔːf/noun
1 Linguistics An actual linguistic form: the present participle in English is always the morph ‘-ing’...
- When it deals with morphs and morphemes, morphology is known as morphemics.
2 Biology Each of several variant forms of an animal or plant.Analysis of heterochronic processes associated with sexual dimorphism requires the arbitrary choice of a reference morph in the dimorphic pair....
- In some cases, variation in reproductive strategies has led to alternative queen morphs.
- The four females seen mating during two nesting attempts all remated with the same morph.
Origin
1940s: from Greek morphē 'form'.