Whitewashed Meaning
/wˈaɪˌtwɑʃt/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
verbsimple past and past participle of whitewash
adjPainted with the temporary paint whitewash.
Sentence Examples
The family lived in a beautiful and whitewashed cottage in the hills.
To whitewash means to cover a surface with a thin and white paint.
The traditional cottage had beautiful whitewashed walls.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The old brick wall was ____ with a coat of white paint.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The small village was filled with beautiful ____ houses that looked very bright and cheerful in the sunlight today.
Word Origin & History
Etymology tree English whitewash English -ed English whitewashed From whitewash + -ed.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser and still-influential MAGA voice, posed the question others were already repeating: "How does an anti–deep state administration put out something this whitewashed? This is not what people voted for.""
— 2025 July 10, Jesus Mesa, “'We've Been Played': MAGA Faces Its Own Disappointment With Trump”, in Newsweek:
""Beyond that the thinking was, 'Slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, so how is the United States still racist?' That's kind of the mind-set I grew up in. Going to a public school in a very white state, I was given a very whitewashed education.""
— 2021, Dave Zirin, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, The New Press, →ISBN, page 153:
"[…] the “scandal” over actress Kerry Washington's seemingly whitewashed skin on the cover of the February 2015 InStyle Magazine, […]"
— 2015, JeffriAnne Wilder, Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 12:
"By casting Paulson in this role while continuing to describe her characters in this way, the show applies racist speech to a whitewashed body, thereby appropriating the history but erasing the bodies of Chang and Eng. This whitewashing ignores the [...] racism [...] that inform[s] both Chang and Eng's story […]"
— 2017, Rebecca Janicker, Reading American Horror Story: Essays on the Television Franchise, McFarland, →ISBN:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The old brick wall was ____ with a coat of white paint.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The small village was filled with beautiful ____ houses that looked very bright and cheerful in the sunlight today.