Pouring is a glaze application technique in which glaze is poured directly over, into, or through a piece rather than the piece being submerged in it. It is the usual choice for work too large or too awkwardly shaped to fit in a glaze bucket, and for applying two or more different glazes to different surfaces of the same piece in separate, controlled steps.
A common setup places the piece on a stand or banding wheel over a catch basin, so glaze poured over the outside runs off and can be collected and reused. A bowl's interior is often glazed by pouring glaze in, swirling it to coat the surface, then pouring the excess back out; the exterior can then be poured or dipped separately, letting a potter combine two different glazes on one piece with a clean line between them where the two coatings meet. Pour speed and how the stream is directed across the surface both affect coverage and thickness, similar to how dip time controls thickness when dipping. The glaze's specific gravity matters just as much here as it does for dipping (see dipping for typical target values); a glaze mixed thin enough to pour smoothly in a controlled stream, rather than in clumps, is also less likely to leave the thick-and-thin banding pouring is prone to.
Pouring gives more direct control than dipping over exactly which surfaces receive which glaze, which is why it is the standard method for interior/exterior glaze combinations rather than dipping a whole piece in a single glaze. It also scales to pieces too large for any practical dipping bucket. The trade-off is more manual technique to get an even coating: an unevenly poured surface, or glaze allowed to pool and run before it sets, can leave visible thick and thin bands that a well-executed dip avoids by design.
A clean boundary between two poured glazes, rather than a blurred or overlapping edge, is usually held with wax resist: a wax emulsion painted along the line where one glaze should stop, left to dry fully (the glaze will bleed into it if poured too soon), so the next glaze poured over that area beads up and runs off instead of coating it. The same wax-resist principle is what lets a bowl's glazed interior stay clean while the exterior is poured or dipped separately.