I couldn't really challenge your claim that
pixelate is a fairly common word, ilandrah - less than an hour after I first read your post, I read this in the
Age newspaper:
On the virtual bookshelf, however, the jacket design is reduced to a thumbnail jpeg, one of millions of pixelated images in an online bookstore. Is this the beginning of the end for book designers?
(Incidentally, this quote strikes a chord with me. One of the things I didn't do well in designing the first
Chihuahua puzzle book, was to make a cover that would work as a thumbnail image. I think the cover looks quite good when you have the book in your hands, but unfortunately nobody considering whether to buy it
will be holding it in their hands, since it's not in any bookstores. When it's displayed like this:
it doesn't exactly stand out. In fact, I think it might be the drabbest puzzle book cover in all of Amazon's vast catalogue!)
Anyhow, the word
pixelate is often used, though as birdy noted,
pixelated is even more common. The words are also in quite a few recent dictionaries. Though
pixelate can be used to mean "render an image in pixels",
digitise is the word normally used for that meaning. Usually,
pixelate means to display an image with visible pixels, sometimes as a deliberate measure to obscure part of a picture.
I'll add both
pixelate and
pixelated to our list. There is an alternate spelling, with a double-L, which is little-used in the US, but seems to be about neck-and-neck with the single-L version in British newspapers. So I'll add
pixellate as well. (
Pixellated has too many letters.)
