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Veneer   /vənˈɪr/   Listen
noun
Veneer  n.  A thin leaf or layer of a more valuable or beautiful material for overlaying an inferior one, especially such a thin leaf of wood to be glued to a cheaper wood; hence, external show; gloss; false pretense.
Veneer moth (Zool.), any moth of the genus Chilo; so called because the mottled colors resemble those of veneering.



verb
Veneer  v. t.  (past & past part. veneered; pres. part. veneering)  To overlay or plate with a thin layer of wood or other material for outer finish or decoration; as, to veneer a piece of furniture with mahogany. Used also figuratively. "As a rogue in grain Veneered with sanctimonious theory."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books



... much can be made of this stage in her development. It is more than likely that the teaching was begun at Sophie's own demand, and by the use she made of the opportunities given her you may measure the strength of her ambition. Here was no rich man's doxy lazily seeking a veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough patches of speech and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's child, workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set herself, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... absolutely indescribable; and when I came to reflect on the profoundness of mental quietude—I might say of consolation—that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and where this outward seeming is absent, they are completely ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern -- Volume 11 • Various

... the exquisite privilege of basking in the smiles of that young Bostonian. But perhaps her chief delusion was the belief that she was an artist. She had learned all that Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton's entire capital had been something less than her half-yearly income, she might have made a name for herself; but ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr

... the coronary cushion secrete the horn tubules forming the wall, and the papillae of the perioplic ring secrete the varnish-like veneer of thin horn covering the outside surface ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the noblesse of the Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a new ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton


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