gloss

noun

1. (uncountable, usually)A surface shine or luster.
2. (figuratively, uncountable, usually)A superficially or deceptively attractive appearance.

   “.”

   “To me more dear, congenial to my heart, / One native charm than all the gloss of art.”

   “Hodgson may now have to bring in James Milner on the left and, on that basis, a certain amount of gloss was taken off a night on which Welbeck scored twice but barely celebrated either before leaving the pitch angrily complaining to the Slovakian referee.”

3. (countable)A brief explanatory note or translation of a foreign, archaic, technical, difficult, complex, or uncommon expression, inserted after the original, in the margin of a document, or between lines of a text.

   “All this, without a gloss or comment, / He would unriddle in a moment.”

   “He was a prolific annotator - writing around fifty thousand glosses in as many as twenty manuscripts.”

4. (countable)Synonym of glossary, a collection of such notes.
5. (countable, obsolete)An expression requiring such explanatory treatment.
6. (countable)An extensive commentary on some text.
7. (US, countable)An interpretation by a court of a specific point within a statute or case law.

   “This volume is thus not a narrowly defined treatment of the Code of Professional Responsibility but rather represents a "common law" gloss on it.”

   “Judicial Gloss on Test [section title]”

8. A definition or explanation of a word sense.

   “Dictionary entries comprise two essential parts, the headword ('lemma') and the author's explanation ('gloss').”

   “Therefore, for many of the Hebrew words in this book, I have provided more than one gloss (using a slash to separate alternatives, or double slashes when a single slash would be ambiguous), in order to give you a sense of the possible meanings of nuances […].”

verb

1. (transitive)To give a gloss or sheen to.
2. (transitive)To make (something) attractive by deception

   “You have the art to gloss the foulest cause.”

3. (intransitive)To become shiny.
4. (idiomatic, transitive)Used in a phrasal verb: gloss over (“to cover up a mistake or crime, to treat something with less care than it deserves”).
5. (transitive)To add a gloss to (a text).