Monday, October 1, 2007

Today's Words: pixilated/pixelated

pixilated/pixillated or pixelated/pixellated: There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet about whether to use one ell or two, but there are very different meanings to these two words. Pixellated refers to what happens when you zoom too far into a JPEG and start to see individual squares (pixels, but blown up). Pixellated letters lead to jaggies, those jagged curves (although anti-aliasing has largely smoothed the jaggies down). One the other hand, pixillated has been around longer. It comes from an irregular form of the word pixie and means "somewhat unbalanced mentally." I don't know about you, but I often feel pixillated after a long day of staring at a computer screen...