Word of the Day!

anamorphic [an-uh-mawr-fik]

adjective:
producing, relating to, or marked by intentional distortion by having or producing unequal magnifications along two axes perpendicular to each other.

Examples:

Looked at from a certain angle - like an anamorphic skull - this essay is concerned with literary criticism. (Will Self, A Posthumous Shock, Harper's Magazine, December 2021)

The cat, along with a cresting ocean wave above the streets of Seoul, wasn’t a biology experiment gone awry. It was a 3-D anamorphic outdoor ad, a proof-of-concept from several Asian design firms. (Steven Zeitchik, Soon when you walk down the street, 3-D creatures could try to sell you something, The Washington Post, December 2021)

He uses his skills in anamorphic paintings, the effects he uses popping a picture off the page in more than one dimension. (Sheila Hagar, Walla Walla author, illustrator looks past Land of Oz in new graphic novel, Union-Bulletin, December 2021)

Origin:

Anamorphosis is the process of creating an anamorphic picture, one that has been distorted so that it appears normal when viewed from a particular direction or with a suitable mirror or lens.

Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors, is a good example, in which a distorted shape lies diagonally across the bottom of the frame. Viewing this from an acute angle transforms it into a skull (it seems that the picture was designed to be hung on a staircase, so that people coming up the stairs would be correctly placed to see and be startled by it).

A more common example is a warning notice on the road, which is extended lengthways so that drivers will see it correctly from their foreshortened perspective; another is the process of making and projecting wide-screen cinema pictures, which use anamorphic lenses to fit the picture into the squarer-shaped frames of the film and reproduce them again. Some anamorphic images have been drawn on paper so they only make sense when viewed in a vertical polished cylinder of the correct diameter placed in the middle.

The word was created in the early eighteenth century from Greek ana-, back, and morphosis, a shaping. (World Wide Words)

    
(click to enlarge)

Probably borrowed from French anamorphique, derivative (by analogy with other derivatives with -morphique -morphic) of anamorphose 'anamorphosis (image produced by a distorting optical system),' borrowed from New Latin anamorphosis, probably from Greek ana- ana- + -morphōsis (Merriam-Webster)