spotty
/ˈspɒti
/adjective (spottier, spottiest)
1Marked with spots: a spotty purple flower...
- They wore long black cloaks and tall pointy black hats, and had crooked noses and rode on broomsticks, or else they drove around in large Daimlers, ordering their menservants to steal spotty dogs.
Synonyms
spotted, mottled, speckled, speckly, flecked, specked, stippled
informal splodgy, splotchy
technical macular, maculate, maculated, foxed, guttate
polka-dot, spotted, dotted
informal dotty
1.1British Having pimples: a spotty youth...
- David is the fatherless image of adolescent youth, rake-thin, spotty and with an ill-defined sense-of-being, provided by his uncle's friends.
- I could visualise all the spotty first-years outside, in tears because they had missed out on tickets to an exhilarating show that had sold out earlier that afternoon.
- They might be like fat people you see in elevators, the spotty people at the beach, the sour people in parking lots.
Synonyms
pimply, pimpled, acned, poor-complexioned;
pockmarked, pocky;
blotchy, blotched
informal zitty
Scottish informal plooky
1.2North American Of uneven quality; patchy: his spotty record on the environment...
- The on-and-off-again availability of Sills' recorded legacy is as mysterious as its quality is spotty.
- The transfer is good, although the quality is spotty given the low-budget stock used.
- The video quality is spotty, with jagged lines and minor compression issues.
Synonyms
patchy, uneven, inconsistent, erratic, fluctuating, irregular, non-uniform
Derivatives
spottily
- The country has a well-defined highway system that can take you right around much of the island (the windy, sparsely populated north-east coast is spottily covered).
- Perhaps The Woodsman was ultimately too low-budget and spottily distributed to compete with the big studio releases.
- National laws already prohibit sonograms for gender detection, which becomes possible after the 14th week, but the law has been spottily enforced.
spottiness
- Note that ectoparasite intensity was not significantly correlated with the date of its census, and brood size was not associated with female plumage spottiness.
- There's a modicum of spottiness and film grain at the very beginning of the first reel, but things clear up quite nicely thereafter.
- Does all this variation in spottiness make a difference to the butterflies?