to put a covering over a surface: to cover a person's head or face, or to clad a wall or object with a layer of gold, silver, or fine wood
This verb is about a surface that is no longer bare. Somebody lays a layer over it, and the reader is meant to notice both the layer and what it says. The Hebrew Bible uses it in two settings that could hardly look less alike: heads, and walls.
Five of its twelve appearances are about a head. David climbs the Mount of Olives weeping and barefoot with his head covered, and the whole crowd behind him copies the gesture. Haman hurries home from his humiliation the same way. Twice in Jeremiah, men who went looking for water and found none come back and do it too. Every time, the covered head stands beside words for shame and weeping, so this is a public statement rather than a matter of comfort or modesty.
The other group of verses is builders' work. In 2 Chronicles 3 the temple is clad with cypress and then with fine gold, room by room, down to the weight of the nails. Chronicles slips back and forth between this verb and the ordinary word for plating metal onto something (צָפָה) inside four verses, so in that chapter the two appear to be doing the same job.
Two verses stretch the word at either end. In Esther, at the moment the king's sentence falls, Haman's face is covered. In a famously difficult line of Psalm 68, a dove's wings are described as silver plated. What holds all of it together is the plain picture of one thing laid over another, whether the layer is cloth over a face or gold over a wall.