Pronounced: jihv, noun/verb
Notes: A great hangman word
Yesterday’s phrase
The phrase per contra means
- on the contrary; by way of context; on the other hand
- as an offset
Background
Well, the background is a bit confusing. One place just says tersely that it is from Latin per contrā. The more interesting one says that it is from Italian (literally, “by the opposite side [of the ledger]”) and is a bookkeeping term. The “father of accounting” was an Italian named “Luca Pacioli”, a Franciscan friar, mathematician, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci.
First usage
The word came into English in the mid-1500s.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 