PICA • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Pica

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/pˈaɪkə/ Listen

noun

Pica n.

(Zool.) The genus that includes the magpies.

(Med.) A vitiated appetite that craves what is unfit for food, such as clay, chalk, ashes, coal, etc.; chthonophagia.

Synonyms: allotriophagy.

(R. C. Ch.) A service-book. See Pie. (Obs.)

(Print.) A size of type next larger than small pica, and smaller than English. Note: This line is printed in pica Note: Pica is twice the size of nonpareil, and is used as a standard of measurement in casting leads, cutting rules, etc., and also as a standard by which to designate several larger kinds of type, as double pica, two-line pica, four-line pica, and the like.

Small pica (Print.), a size of type next larger than long primer, and smaller than pica. Note: This line is printed in small pica

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Etymology of 'Pica'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Pica" Quotes from Famous Books

... the same avertissement as that of 1746. The imprint is M.DCC.LX. The type resembles our small pica, and the paper has the water-mark Auvergne 1749. At the end of the second part appears, De l'imprimerie de Didot, rue Pavee, 1760. This must be M. Francois Didot of Paris. I find the same colophon in the Bibliographie instructive, ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various

... size bears a proportionate relation to every other size, has done much to remedy this trouble, and now nearly all type is made on that basis. An American point is practically one seventy-second of an inch. Actually it is .013837 inch. It was based on the pica size most extensively in use in this country. This pica was divided into twelve equal parts and each part called a point. All the other sizes were made to conform to multiples of this point. The point is so near ...

— The Building of a Book • Various

... Chambers[390], has very good materials for such a work, which I have seen, and will do it at a very low rate[391]. I think the terms of War and Navigation might be comprised, with good explanations, in one 8vo. Pica, which he is willing to do for twelve shillings a sheet, to be made up a guinea at the second impression. If you think on it, I will wait on ...

— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... influence was greatest in medievalism, if not in all the history of Christianity, was Francis of Assisi, who "all seraphical in order rose a sun upon the world." (Par. XI, 37.) Born at Assisi in Umbria in 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and of Pica, a member of a noble family of Provence, Francis grew up a handsome, gay and gallant youth "the prime favorite among the young nobles of the town, the foremost in every feat of arms, the leader of civil revels, the very king of frolic." A low fever contracted when with his fellow citizens ...

— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery