the.com/outline
the skeleton you build before the body, then quietly abandon halfway through.
means A line marking the outer edge of a shape, or a rough preliminary plan listing the main points of something before the details are filled in.
from A plain English compound: "out" plus "line," meaning literally the line marking the outside of a thing. It surfaced in the 17th century as an artist's and draftsman's term — the contour line drawn first to bound a figure. The figurative "summary of main points" sense grew naturally from that: the bare boundary of an idea before you color it in.
- roman roots
- Ancient orators memorized speeches via mental room-by-room layouts.
- art origin
- Earliest drawings were pure contour, no shading at all.
- legend says
- A girl traced her lover's shadow, inventing portraiture.
- writer's lie
- Many novelists outline meticulously, then ignore every point.
- map echo
- Coastlines are nature's outlines, infinitely long up close.