beauty spot

English

WOTD – 26 February 2023

Etymology

The South Korean rapper and singer Chaeyoung (Son Chae-young) has a beauty spot (sense 1.1) on the left side of her chin beneath her lips in the form of a mole.
Portrait einer Dame mit Maske (Portrait of a Woman with a Mask, 19th century), an anonymous painting depicting a woman with a prominent beauty spot (sense 1.2) on the right side of her face.

From beauty (noun) + spot (noun). Some uses of sense 1 (“thing which is beautiful”) are figurative uses of sense 1.2 (“patch on the face to heighten beauty”).[1]

Pronunciation

Noun

beauty spot (plural beauty spots)

  1. (archaic) A thing (especially an aspect of something) which is beautiful.
    1. A natural mark on a person's skin, especially a freckle or mole on a woman's face.
      Synonym: beauty mark
    2. (cosmetics, historical) A patch or spot drawn or placed on the face in order to heighten beauty.
      Synonyms: beauty mark, mouche
      • 1701, Nehemiah Grew, “Of the Ends of Providence. And First, in this Life.”, in Cosmologia Sacra: Or A Discourse of the Universe as It is the Creature and Kingdom of God. [], London: [] W. Rogers, S. Smith, and B[enjamin] Walford: [], OCLC 642328229, 3rd book, paragraph 49, page 102:
        The Deformity, and Filthyneſs of Svvine, make them the Beauty-ſpot of the Animal Creation, and the Emblem of all Vice.
        Used figuratively to refer to a thing which enhances the attractiveness of something else.
    3. (ornithology, archaic) Synonym of speculum (a bright, lustrous patch of colour found on the wings of ducks and some other birds, usually situated on the distal portions of the secondary quills, and much more brilliant in the adult male than in the female)
  2. (chiefly Britain) A place noted for its beauty, especially its natural scenery.

Translations

References

  1. beauty spot, n.”, in OED Online , Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, December 2021; beauty spot, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

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