daguerreotype means an early type of photograph created by exposing a silver surface which has previously been exposed to either iodine vapor or iodine and bromine vapors; such a photograph. Lexicurio rates it Rare gem — a strength score of 84 out of 100.
daguerreotype is pronounced /dəˈɡɛɹ.(ɪ.)əʊˌtaɪp/.
Why “daguerreotype” is a great word
DAGUERREOTYPE — [Noun] An early photographic process, publicly announced in 1839, that produces a unique direct-positive image on a silvered copper plate. From French daguerréotype, a compound named after its inventor, the French artist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), and the Greek-derived suffix -type, meaning "impression" or "model." Unlike the calotype—which yields a reproducible paper negative—or the ambrotype—a later glass-plate simulation—the daguerreotype is an irreplicable original, a singular artifact of captured light. It is the mercury-vapor apparition trapped under glass: a face emerging from a polished silver void, a still street holding the blur of a lone bootblack, the disconcerting warmth of the case against the palm. Each plate is a fossil of a single, unrepeatable moment of light—a paradox of permanence and exquisite fragility, proving that to be remembered is also to be sealed away.
noun
- An early type of photograph created by exposing a silver surface which has previously been exposed to either iodine vapor or iodine and bromine vapors; such a photograph.“The awakening of science to this new way of seeing the cosmos began with Johann Ritter in 1801. By 1815, scientists found that Ritter's “chemical rays” [ultraviolet rays] darkened not just silver chloride but also many other kinds of metallic salts. Between 1826 and 1837, Nicéphore Niépce, credited with taking the first successful photograph, in 1827, and Louis Daguerre, the most famous photograph”
- The process of making such photographs.
- A faithful or exact representation or description.“What was most admired was the facade of the great and ancient Gothic church of St. Mary,—which was reflected with such exactness that it appeared to be a daguerreotype design; so that all the lines and contours of the innumerable ornaments which cover this facade, were distinguished with ease.”
verb
- To make a photograph using this process, to make a daguerreotype (of).
- To describe or represent exactly or faithfully; depict.“[H]e scanned my countenance with a pair of fierce, blood-shot eyes that I knew would daguerreotype my appearance indellibly^([sic]) and faithfully upon his mind.”