[f. L. foli-um + -ATE.]
† 1. trans. To beat (metal) to a leaf or foil.
1704–21. Newton, Opticks (ed. 3), 162. If Gold be foliated and held between your Eye and the Light, the Light looks of a greenish blue.
b. intr. To split into leaves or laminæ.
1798. Greville, in Phil. Trans., LXXXVIII. 414. Other parts appear to foliate.
1836. Caldcleugh, in Foreign Q. Rev., XVII. April, 9/1. [It] foliates at its surface with a facility not usual in our parts of the world, and becomes a friable and very light kind of stone.
2. trans. To foil (glass); to silver.
1665. Hooke, Microgr., 83. If you foliate that part of a Glass-ball that is to reflect an Iris, as in the Cartesian Experiment, above mention’d, the reflections will be abundantly more strong, and the colours more vivid.
1818. Blackw. Mag., III. Aug., 614/2. The same angle produced by the mirror he endeavoured to retain upon the sides of the lens, by giving it a different form, a peculiar part of which he intended to foliate.
3. intr. To put forth leaves.
1775. Romans, Hist. Florida, 7. This tardy [mulberry] tree budded, foliated, blossomed, and bore ripe fruit with the amazing rapidity of only four weeks time immediately after the gust.
1893. A. T. Quiller-Couch, Delectable Duchy, 162. The head gamekeeper of this estate tells me we shall have a hot summer, because the oak this year was in leaf before the ash, though only by a day. The ash was foliating on the 29th of April, the oak on the 28th.
4. trans. To decorate with foils see FOIL sb.1 2 b).
1812–6. J. Smith, The Panorama of Science and Art, I. 136. There seems to have been little if any attempt at feathering or foliating the heads of Norman doors or windows.
1835. R. Willis, Archit. Mid. Ages, 45. There is a manifest distinction between foiling an arch, and foliating it. In the first case, the arch itself is indented into a number of small arches; in the second case, such a foiled arch is placed below it. [This distinction is seldom recognized.]
1851. Ruskin, Stones Ven. (1874), I. i. 13. Those old Greeks gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch.
5. trans. To mark the folios or leaves of (a volume, etc.) with consecutive numbers.
1846–7. Maskell, Mon. Rit., I. p. cxix. The first leaf is not numbererd: afterwards it is regularly foliated to the end, from i. to c.iiij.
1848. Halliwell, Acc. Vernon MS., 3 It numbers ff. 412 and 8 ab init.; ff. 311–318, 403–412, not foliated.
Hence Foliating ppl. a.
1835. R. Willis, Archit. Mid. Ages, 45. This foliating arch continued for a long period to be treated as an independent order with itw own piers.
