Find the word definition

Crossword clues for defacement

The Collaborative International Dictionary
Defacement

Defacement \De*face"ment\, n.

  1. The act of defacing, or the condition of being defaced; injury to the surface or exterior; obliteration.

  2. That which mars or disfigures.
    --Bacon.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
defacement

1560s, from deface + -ment.

Wiktionary
defacement

n. 1 An act of deface; an instance of visibly marring or disfigure something. 2 An act of voiding or devalue; nullification of the face value. 3 (context heraldry vexillology English) A symbol added to a flag or coat of arms to change it or make it different from another.

WordNet
defacement

n. the act of damaging the appearance or surface of something; "the defacement of an Italian mosaic during the Turkish invasion"; "he objected to the dam's massive disfigurement of the landscape" [syn: disfigurement, disfiguration]

Wikipedia
Defacement

Defacement or Disfigured may refer to:

  • Defacement (vandalism), the vandalism of physical objects, like buildings, books, paintings and statues
  • Website defacement, an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of the site
  • Defacement (flag), a term used in heraldry and vexillology
  • Deface (film) (2007), a short film about a North Korean man pushed to the edge by his daughter's senseless death
  • Disfigured (film) (2008) a film about two American women struggling with weight issues
Defacement (flag)

Defacement is a term used in heraldry and vexillology to refer to the addition of a symbol or charge to another flag. For example, the New Zealand flag is the British Blue Ensign defaced with a Southern Cross in the fly. In the context of vexillology, the word "deface" carries no negative connotations, in contrast to general usage. It simply indicates differentiation of the flag from that of another owner by addition of elements. For example, many state flags are formed by defacing the national flag with a coat of arms.

Where countries pass through changes of regime with contrasting ideological orientations (monarchist/republican, fascist/democrat, communist/capitalist, secular/religious etc.)—all of which, despite their differences, claim allegiance to a common national heritage expressed in a venerated national flag—it can happen that a new regime defaces that flag with its own specific emblem while keeping the basic flag design unchanged. Such changing ideological emblems appeared over time, among others, on the flags of Italy, Hungary, Romania, Germany (West and East, see illustration) Ethiopia and Iran. As a result, during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Romanian Revolution of 1989, insurgents tore out of the national flag the emblem of the regime which they opposed, and waved the flag itself with which they identified.

An already defaced flag can be further defaced. For example, the Australian flag is already a defaced Blue Ensign. The Australian Border Force Flag is further defaced with the words "border force".

In the United States it is an offence under the Flag Code to deface the national flag with advertising or with any other sigil, image or insignia. Such flags are nevertheless commercially available, depicting the seals of various branches of the U.S. military, Native American related objects such as tomahawks or war bonnets, and the like. It is common for association football supporters travelling abroad for a match to bring a national flag defaced with the name of their home town or a similar local identifier.

Defacement (vandalism)

Defacement is a type of vandalism that involves damaging the appearance or surface of something. The object of damage may be architecture, books, paintings, sculpture or other forms of art.

Examples of defacement include:

  • Marking or removing the part of an object (especially images, be they on the page, in illustrative art or as a sculpture) designed to hold the viewers' attention
  • Scoring a book cover with a blade
  • Splashing paint over a painting in a gallery
  • Smashing the nose of a sculpted bust
  • Altering the content of web sites and publicly editable repositories to include nonsensical or whimsical references.

Iconoclasm led to the defacement of many religious artworks.

Usage examples of "defacement".

The environmentalists worried about defacement of the landscape, the amplified ugliness of cities surrounded by bunds taller than twelve-story buildings.

Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view.

Here and there were subtle defacements, the largest boulders morphing into trollishness.

He had even corrected library books, embellishing their margins with ¶s and lc's and s, which he viewed not as defacements but as "improvements.

Virginal paperbacks, their margins a tabula rasa for narcissistic scribbles, were cheap enough to inspire minimal guilt when I wrote in them and bland enough to accept my defacements without complaint.

A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I'd woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.

Defiant at first, Inky swore he would never stop his defacements, but being admitted to the Gang, a place where he could finally belong, worked wonders.

The church burnings seemed to feed off one another, much as a rash of synagogue defacements had in 1992.