pencils

Noun

pencil (plural pencils)

1. A writing utensil with a graphite (commonly referred to as lead) shaft, usually blended with clay, clad in wood, and sharpened to a taper.

   Synonyms:

   lead pencil

2. An aggregate or collection of rays of light, especially when diverging from, or converging to, a point.
   • [T]hey all ran off into the night to the miser’s ruined castle, with its solitary pencil of light in its high turret chamber[.]1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 64
3. A family of geometric objects with a common property, such as the set of lines that pass through a given point in a projective plane.
   • When, by the pencil becoming oblique to the surface, the vergency produced on the pencil becomes changed, the primary and secondary focal points, V and H, separate […]1863, The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal
4. (historical) A paintbrush.
   • But living art may not least part expresse, / Nor life-resembling pencill it can paynt[…].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Prologue”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 389
5. (obsolete, rare) A small medicated bougie.
6. (obsolete) A small, thin tuft of hairs or feathers.
   • It is almost entirely of a slatey colour, with yellow bill and feet, but the feathers of the rump and upper tail-coverts each terminate in a rigid, glossy pencil or tuft of a vivid crimson.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 431

See all 8 meanings of pencil