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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Spray-paint

Spray-paint \Spray"-paint\ (spr[=a]"p[=a]nt), v. t. To paint (a surface) by means of a spray, using a spray can or spray gun.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
spray-paint

1928, from spray (v.) + paint (v.). Related: Spray-painting (1902).

Usage examples of "spray-paint".

Roy figured this had to be the same place where the police car got spray-painted and the alligators were hidden inside the latrines.

Most graffitists just scribble something down and run away, having made their point, but the people with the red spray-paint were performing black magic, exercising ritual care.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.

Your organization has freely admitted to scuttling whaling ships, blocking waterways, spray-painting baby seals, harassing sealers, cutting drift nets.

Cellophane fragments were trapped in its stiff little branches, dirty words were spray-painted on the walls, and I wondered if I'd have the nerve to ask Frank for my job back.

Slowing us down, too, is the appearance ahead of us of a logging truck, stacked with jumbo Douglas fir logs, the ends of which are spray-painted with red numbers and which are almost piercing our windshield.

A boy in a Marlins baseball cap and high-top Air Jordans stood on a cinder block spray-painting a wall with a $2.

Wolf and Bobby took one of the unmarked Werewolf cars, a medallioned yellow cab, its top spray-painted with infra-red dye that could be tracked by a helicopter.

Even the front of the decrepit brick building next door to the 101st had been spray-painted with graffiti, a seeming impossibility for a street where cops constantly came and went, day and night.

I could see the bumper still in Morelli's backseat, and someone had spray-painted PIG on his driver's-side door.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway .

She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver.

The camera panned again, to a wall where HELOTS RULE OK had been spray-painted in letters three meters high.

Then, as the train entered a straight-away, the interior lights would come on again and she would become aware once again of the acrid smell, the jostling of nearby straphangers, the miniature television surveillance cameras (locked in protective cages and subsequently spray-painted blind), the stylized multicolored map showing the complete underground transportation system of the City of New York, and the high-frequency screech of the brakes as they pulled into the stations.

He kept expecting to come up here someday and find that the big kids had pulled the sign down or spray-painted something like SUCK MY DICK on it, but none ever had.