splat

Meanings

Noun

• The narrow wooden centre piece of a chair back.
• The sharp, atonal sound of a liquid or soft solid hitting a solid surface.
• The irregular shape of a viscous liquid or soft solid which has hit a solid surface.
• The Command key on an Apple Macintosh.
• Any of various characters appearing in computer character sets.
• A move in playboating involving stalling in place while positioned vertically against a solid object in the water.
• A children's game in which one person, in the centre of a circle of players, points and says "SPALT!" at another player. That player then ducks down and the two players either side of them point and say "SPLAT!". The slowest to react is and eliminated from the game. The final is settled by a Mexican standoff.

Verb

• To hit a flat surface and deform into an irregular shape.
• To splatter.
• To combine different textures by applying an alpha channel map to the higher levels, revealing the layers underneath where the map is partially or completely transparent.

Origin

• From earlier splat, from Middle English splatten, splaten. Compare dialectal English splat.
• Onomatopoeia