Word.ws English Dictionary

paint down

paint down verb: to apply blackface to (an actor).

Verb

paint down (third-person singular simple present paints down, present participle painting down, simple past and past participle painted down)

  1. (transitive) To apply blackface to (an actor).
    • White actors in blackface were so common that even Shirley Temple was painted down in The Littlest Rebel (1935).2015, Mollie Gregory, Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story, page 28
    • Producer reaffirms that this Section 14 prohibits the practice commonly referred to as 'painting down'. […] The protests were in opposition to the literal adoption of blackface within Tropic that ultimately disallowed the gainful employment of male African-American actors.2015, Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting, page 54
  2. (transitive) To coat with a substance through painting.
    • Paint it down in resin.

Forms of paint down

third-person singular presentpaints down
present participlepainting down
past participlepainted down
pastpainted down

Questions about paint down

What does paint down mean?
Paint down means to apply blackface to (an actor).
What part of speech is paint down?
Paint down is a verb.
What is the past tense of paint down?
The past tense of paint down is painted down.

Words near paint down in the dictionary

  1. paint brushes
  2. paint bucket
  3. paint buckets
  4. paint by numbers
  5. Paint Creek
  6. paint down
  7. paint gun
  8. paint guns
  9. paint horse
  10. paint horses
  11. paint job

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paint down (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.

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