afbildes

Afbildes is a term occasionally found in Dutch-language sources that refers to pictures or visual representations. In modern Dutch, the standard word for this concept is afbeelding (singular) and afbeeldingen (plural). The form afbildes is not part of current official spelling and is generally considered historical or nonstandard.

The appearance of afbildes can be explained as an archaic or variant spelling that occurred in older texts, typographic variants, or OCR errors when digitizing older material. It may reflect earlier orthographic practices before spelling was standardized in Dutch, or regional/spelling quirks that have since fallen out of use. Because it is not the contemporary norm, readers should treat afbildes as equivalent to afbeeldingen in edited or modernized text.

In practice, encountering afbildes usually signals the need to interpret it as meaning “images” and to convert it to the standard afbeelding(s) in modern Dutch. The term is cognate with related words in other Germanic languages, such as German Abbildungen, and with the English word image, all tracing back to a common concept of representation or depiction.

See also: afbeelding, afbeeldingen, Abbildungen. For digital and editorial contexts, use afbeelding (singular) or afbeeldingen (plural) as the correct modern forms.