- graphic
- graphic, vivid, picturesque, pictorial are comparable when they mean having or manifesting a quality or character that produces a strong, clear impression, especially a visual impression. All of these words apply particularly but not exclusively to works of art and especially of literature.Something graphic has the power to evoke a strikingly clear-cut, lifelike picture; the term categorizes such arts as painting, drawing, engraving, and etching (the graphic arts), the object of each of which is to present a picture, but it is also meaningfully applied to a representation of things in words{
a graphic description of the face of a young Hindu at the sight of castor oil— Darwin
}{it is also one of the best-written works on the subject, enlivened by a keen sense of humor and a witty and graphic style— Ullmann
}Something vivid is so vigorously alive that it is felt, seen, heard, or otherwise apprehended with a sense of its intense reality. The term may apply to what actually exists and impresses itself with such sharp force on the imagination that the memory retains the sight, sound, or other impression{a vivid sensation of fear
}{figures so vivid that they seem to breathe and speak before us—L. P. Smith
}{how sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss— Woolf
}The term may also apply to a mental state or process of which one is oneself intensely aware{Ripton awoke ... to the vivid consciousness of hunger— Meredith
}{my sense of right or wrong—of individual responsibility—was more vivid than at any other period of my life— Hudson
}{those for whom the belief in immortality is most vivid— Krutch
}or which defines its content clearly and sharply{a man of wide and vivid interests— Russell
}{a vivid realization of approaching danger
}{all three had kept a vivid . . . recollection ... of what they had seen— Wharton
}Frequently the term applies to whatever represents life or one's imaginative conceptions (as a picture, or a play, or a story) or to matters (as style, colors, language, or situations) which are involved in such a representation; then the implication is of a power, either in the representation itself or in the means of representation, to evoke clearly defined pictures and to give a strong sense of their distinct quality and of their living force{moving pictures are only less vivid than reflections from a mirror— Justice Holmes
}{in his odes, with their thunder of place-names, he [Horace] makes vivid the territorial immensity of the empire— Buchan
}Something picturesque has, in general, the qualities or the character which one believes essential to a striking or effective picture. The term is applicable to a place, a person, or a building or other construction{a picturesque costume
}{Scott's Meg Merrilies is a picturesque character
}{a picturesque ruin
}as well as to a work of graphic, literary, or plastic art{a picturesque landscape
}{picturesque details
}and to a style or manner (as in writing or painting){the picturesque force of his style— Hawthorne
}and it carries in every use an implication that the thing has been observed and judged with regard for its form, color, atmosphere, striking or unfamiliar detail, or sharp contrasts rather than for qualities which are not perceptible to the eye or that do not draw the eye because they are lacking in distinctness and charm. Sometimes picturesque specifically implies a kind of wild, rugged beauty associated with untouched or undisciplined nature or with things being reclaimed by nature{wide prospects of startling beauty, rugged mountains, steep gorges, great falls of water—all the things that are supposed to be picturesque— Benson
}{a venerable family mansion, in a highly picturesque state of semidilapidation— Peacock
}In still other contexts the term implies a charm arising rather from remoteness, strangeness, quaintness, informality, or diversity{though the upper part of Durnover was mainly composed of a curious congeries of barns and farmsteads, there was a less picturesque side to the parish— Hardy
}{the Square is rather picturesque, but it's such a poor, poor little thing!— Bennett
}{the most picturesque Mediterranean craft, with colored sails and lazy evolutions— Brownell
}Something pictorial presents or aims to present a vivid picture; thus, the pictorial arts are the same as the graphic arts, but the emphasis is upon the objective rather than upon the medium; a pictorial style of poetry uses words as though they were colors or pigments by which a vivid representation is produced{she has evidently been very anxious to maintain the tradition of picturesqueness in biography that Strachey founded, and in many places is more than picturesque, is in fact pictorial— Times Lit. Sup.
}{he made pictorial drama out of the most commonplace intimacies of French bourgeois home life— Soby
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
