Word.ws English Dictionary

impasto

impasto noun: the use of a thick-bodied paint to create peaks and crests that physically extend from the surface of a painting.

impasto: the use of a thick-bodied paint to create peaks and crests that physically extend from the surface...
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

impasto (countable and uncountable, plural impastos)

  1. (painting) The use of a thick-bodied paint to create peaks and crests that physically extend from the surface of a painting.
    • He was thinking, ʽGot to get a subject where a man can weight the impasto in light. Paint thin against light. Got to remember that.ʼ1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 63
    • […]all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas.1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1st US edition, New York: Viking Press, →ISBN, part 1: Beyond the Zero, page 5

Verb

impasto (third-person singular simple present impastoes, present participle impastoing, simple past and past participle impastoed)

  1. (painting) To paint in thick-bodied paint; to paint in impasto style.
    • "She looked tall to me, and slim, with delicate Semitic features, and a full mouth that she impastoed with red lipstick to play against her […]"1991, Joyce Nakamura, Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Series, Volume 14

Forms of impasto

Noun
pluralimpastos
Verb
third-person singular presentimpastoes
present participleimpastoing
past participleimpastoed
pastimpastoed

Origin of impasto

Borrowed from Italian impasto.

Words formed from impasto

Questions about impasto

What does impasto mean?
Impasto means the use of a thick-bodied paint to create peaks and crests that physically extend from the surface of a painting.
What part of speech is impasto?
Impasto can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of impasto?
The plural of impasto is impastos.

Words near impasto in the dictionary

  1. Impastato
  2. impaste
  3. impasted
  4. impastes
  5. impasting
  6. impasto
  7. impastoed
  8. impastoes
  9. impastoing
  10. impastor
  11. impastors

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: impasto (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “impasto.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/impasto. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.