china girl
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.92 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A moving or still image of a woman or mannequin, used by film processing technicians to calibrate colour balance and exposure of skin tones in reproduction.
American usage; Countable; Uncountable
noun
Name given to cultivars of various tree, shrub and plant species, including dogwood, holly, orchids, etc.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
A young woman of Chinese (or other East Asian) descent.
Countable; Dated; Offensive; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "A final group of Hollywood’s usually invisible working class is introduced in Fisher’s comments about the use of the China Girl, the images of women dressed in multicolored clothes that are often seen on heads and tails of reels of film. The China Girl’s function is to act as a color-control standard: The skin-tone of white skin is the norm against which other colors are measured."
- "It is really amazing how easily colorists can screw up the look of your film with a few misconceptions about proper skin tones and by using the dreaded china girl. (A china girl is a pasty white specimen of a girl that a colorist uses as a reference when balancing the colors on your film.)"
- "If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer. There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble. Flesh is different. Flesh needs to resemble flesh. It has a norm, a referent: the China girl. Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces. And if faces look wrong, we question everything."
- "Her hair was black and straight, cut in a demure China girl cut that didn’t quite match her aggressive looks."
- "[…] when she was on her own she had to remove her contacts and don the chestnut brown ‘China Girl’ wig that was the centrepiece of her daily disguise."
- "Rondo’s also over-the-top fem. Like Richard Simmons queeny, but the Chicano version with an asymmetrical China-girl bob."