Dictionary

inkstained en · ADJ

Etymology

From inkstain + -ed.

Meanings

1. That has been stained with ink.
   • Whenever a parcel heavier than usual was dropped on the floor by a careless coolie, I expected that the room, with its ink-stained, paper-panelled walls, on which were pasted or fixed with quaint-headed pins the steamship bills and those of several of the theatre tea-houses, would collapse forthwith with no more warning than the crack of its slight, dry timbers. 1895, Clive Holland, My Japanese Wife, A Japanese Idyl, page 91:
   • Pausing, before the Bridge, at the grotesquely ugly tablet on the house where New York's greatest poet with his own inkstained hands set type for Leaves of Grass. 1983, Christopher Morley, “City of Glory and Despair”, in New York Magazine, volume 16, number 22, page 44:
   • He had inkstained fingertips and a big heart, and this bedridden shrunken-down version too weak to get out of bed was an ominous image of what could be and what would never be. 2014, Lee Henderson, The Road Narrows as You Go:
   • He popularized the phrase, “Turn the page, wash your hands,” in reference to dirty hands being ink-stained by cheap comic books. 2021, Don H. Corrigan, American Roadkill, The Animal Victims of Our Busy Highways, page 68:

Forms