Did You Know?Remove the first syllable of pertinacious and say what remains out loud: you'll hear something that sounds a lot like the word tenacious, meaning "tending to adhere or cling." The similarity between pertinacious and tenacious isn't mere coincidence; both words derive from tenax, ...
In 1877, British novelist George Eliot believed she had coined meliorist when she wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." Her contemporaries credited her with coining both meliorist and meliorism, and one of her letters contains an early do...
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synonymous with disorderly or unregulated, is now archaic, but it offers a hint as to the origins of inordinate. The word traces back to the Latin verb ordinare, meaning "to arrange," combined with the negative prefix in-. Ordinare is also the ancestor ...
like the word wordiness. In other words, a writer with a fondness for verbiage might be accused of "wordiness." Some people think the phrase "excess verbiage" is redundant, but that's not necessarily true. Verbiage has a second sense meaning, simply, "wording," with no suggestion of ...
disparaging implication of a style that seems too informal for a situation. Colloquy and colloquial trace back to the Latin verb colloqui, meaning "to converse." Colloqui in turn was formed by combining the prefix com- ("with") and loqui ("to speak"). Other conversational descendants of loqu...
Word of the Day:September 10, 2020 verbin-KUM-ber Definition 1 ： weigh down, burden 减轻负担 2 ： to impede or hamper the function or activity of ： hinder 阻碍 3 ： to burden with a legal claim (such as a mortgage)承担法律责任（例如抵押）Examples "Those who do handle radioactive ...
and property was often valued in terms of cattle. Pecunia has also given us impecunious, a word meaning "having little or no money," while peculium gave us peculate, a synonym for embezzle. In peculium you might also recognize the word peculiar, which originally meant "characteristic of on...
Ubiquitouscomes to us from the noun ubiquity, meaning "presence everywhere or in many places simultaneously." Both words are ultimately derived from the Latin word for "everywhere," which is ubique. Ubiquitous, which has often been used with a touch of exaggeration to describe those things that ...
or capture." Combining prendre with various prefixes has given our language many other words, too, including surprise, reprise, and enterprise. Remarkably, impregnable has a different origin from the similar-looking word pregnant; that word comes from a different Latin word, praegnas, meaning "...