As a result, a Laodicean is an apathetic, indifferent, or unconcerned person when it comes to religion. A mephitis is a noxious, foul-smelling fume emanating from inside the earth, and anything that smells as bad as that is mephitic. As well as being another name for a ship's purser the steward in charge of the ship's accounts , a nipcheese is a mean, penny-pinching person. Feel free to also call your most miserly friend a nip-farthing , a shut-purse , a pinch-plum , or a sharp-nose.
Derived from the same root as the word oblique , if something obliquates then it turns or bends to one side. Ironically, the thesaurus is full of weird and wonderful words for people who don't say very much.
Dating Synonyms, Dating Antonyms | Merriam-Webster Thesaurus
As well as pauciloquent , people who like to keep things brief can be laconic , synoptic , or breviloquent. Quintessence is already a fairly smart-sounding word, but you can up the stakes with quiddity: Derived from a Latin word meaning "who," the quiddity of something is the very essence or nature of something, or a distinctive feature or characteristic. Derived via French from the Latin word for "laugh," if you're riant then you're cheerful or mirthful.
A saccade is an involuntary twitch or movement of the eye—and, figuratively, that makes someone who is saccadic characteristically fidgety, twitchy, or restless. To tergiversate literally means "to turn your back on" something, but more loosely, it means to dodge a question or issue, or to avoid a straightforward explanation. Probably originally meant to be onomatopoeic, ululation is a howling sound like that made by wolves. Derived from the Latin word for a soothsayer or seer, to vaticinate is to prophesize or predict something. Wanchance is an old Scots dialect word for misfortune.
There are more yester — words in the dictionary than just yesterday. As well as yesternight , there's yesterweek , yestereve , and yestermorn. Zoilus was one of the harshest critics of the ancient Greek writer Homer, and he was known for his scathing, nit-picking attacks on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
Derived from him, a zoilist is an overbearingly harsh critic, while unduly harsh criticism is zoilism. Writers often turn to a thesaurus to diversify their vocabulary and add nuance to their prose. But looking up synonyms and antonyms in a thesaurus can help anyone—writer or not—find the most vivid, incisive words to communicate thoughts and ideas. Most logophiles consider the thesaurus to be a treasure trove of diction, but the word thesaurus really does mean "treasure. How do you refer to more than one octopus? People say everything from octopuses to octopi to octopodes.
Similarly, many people have trouble figuring out the correct plural form of the word thesaurus.
Word Count
Ask a French scholar in the 16th century to see his thesaurus, and he'd gladly give you a copy of his dictionary. In the early s, a French printer named Robert Estienne published Thesaurus Linguae Latinae , a comprehensive Latin dictionary listing words that appeared in Latin texts throughout an enormous span of history. Although the Estiennes's books were called thesauruses, they were really dictionaries comprised of alphabetical listings of words with their definitions.
Philo of Byblos, a Greek historian and grammarian, wrote On Synonyms , a dictionary of synonyms that scholars consider to be the first ancient thesaurus. Dating to the late 1st century or early 2nd century CE, the book lists Greek words that are similar in meaning to each another. Rather than compile a boring list of similar words, Amara Sinha turned his thesaurus into a long poem. Divided into three sections—words relating to the divine, the earth, and everyday life— The Amarakosha contains verses so readers could memorize words easily.
This thesaurus is the oldest book of its kind that still exists.
Peter Mark Roget is the British doctor credited with authoring the first modern thesaurus. In , he began compiling a list of words, arranged by their meaning and grouped according to theme. After retiring from his work as a physician in , Roget published his Thesaurus of English words and phrases; so classified and arranged as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition. In fact, we celebrate Thesaurus Day on January 18 because Roget was born on this day in The division between "words people" and "numbers people" is deep-seated. Many mathematicians may try to steer clear of thesauruses, and bibliophiles may avoid calculators, but the thesaurus is actually linked to a mathematical tool.
Around , Roget invented the log-log slide rule, a ruler-like device that allows users to easily calculate the roots and exponents of numbers. So while the inventor of the thesaurus was compiling words for his tome, he was also hard at work on the log-log slide rule.
In , a professor of English Language at Glasgow University suggested that scholars should create a historical thesaurus based on entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. The project was a massive undertaking , as people from multiple countries worked for 44 years to compile and classify words. Published in , the Historical Thesaurus to the Oxford English Dictionary contains , words organized by theme and date.
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The thesaurus covers words and synonyms from Old English to the present day and lets readers discover when certain words were coined and how long they were commonly used. Bochner had incorporated words and synonyms in his paintings for years—which were collectively referred to as the thesaurus paintings—featuring word paintings and lists of synonyms on canvas. The brightly colored paintings feature different groups of English and Yiddish synonyms.
Seen and Heard
According to Bochner, Vietnam and Iraq war veterans cried after seeing his thesaurus painting Die , which features words and phrases such as expire , perish , succumb , drop dead , croak , go belly up , pull the plug , and kick the bucket. Urban Dictionary helps people decipher the latest slang terms, but where should you go when you need a thesaurus of slang?
Urban Thesaurus , of course. The site, which is not affiliated with Urban Dictionary, indexes millions of slang terms culled from slang dictionaries, then calculates usage correlations between the terms. Typing in the word money , for example, gives you an eclectic list of synonyms including scrilla , cheddar , mulah , coin , and bling.
Search for synonyms using the Visual Thesaurus
The Arabic and Simplified Chinese scripts aren't in danger of going anywhere anytime soon, but the same can't be said for Balinese, Mali, Pahawh or Pahauh Hmong, and the other some alphabets that Vermont-based writer Tim Brookes has cataloged in his online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets , which is set for a soft launch on January The featured alphabets—which Brookes has loosely defined to include writing systems of all sorts—are vanishing for varied reasons, including government policies, war, persecution, cultural assimilation, and globalization.
The atlas will include a bit of background information about each alphabet as well as links to any organizations attempting to revive them. By creating a hub for these alphabets, Brookes hopes to connect people who want to preserve their language and culture, while also showing the world how beautiful and intricate some of these scripts—including the 10 below—can be. Although the Manataka American Indian Council says an ancient Cherokee writing system may have existed at one point but was lost to history, Cherokee was more or less a spoken language up until the early 19th century.
Around , a Cherokee man named Sequoyah started working on an character writing system known as a syllabary, in which the symbols represent syllables. Most remarkably, Sequoyah himself had never learned how to read. At the time, many Native Americans deeply distrusted writing systems, and Sequoyah was put on trial for witchcraft after tribal leaders caught wind of his new creation.
However, once they realized that written Cherokee could be used to preserve their language and culture, they asked Sequoyah to start teaching the syllabary. Translation of dating for Spanish speakers Britannica English: Translation of dating for Arabic speakers. What made you want to look up dating?
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Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! It originally meant "having wings". We're open for word business. A step up from 'there,' 'their,' and 'they're'. Comedian ISMO on what separates a boot from a trunk. Comedian ISMO on the complexities of the word 'tip'. How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'.