pierian

Pronounced: pie-EER-ee-uhn, adj

Notes: Another word I may find useful, but I didn’t know

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Yesterday’s word

The word isolato means “a person spiritually or mentally isolated and out of step with their times or community”

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-1800s

Background / Comments

Well! I thought about the plural of this word and thought that it looked Italian, which means that the plural should be isolati (just as the proper plural of concerto is concerti, not concertos). Thinking about concerto/concerti; that is, Italian plurals, reminds of a music course I own in which the teacher points out that graffiti is the plural form; a singular one is a graffito. Anyway, our word is Italian, but at least one dictionary entry says that the plural is isolatoes, but I like isolati better, and there probably is some dictionary that will give this as the plural. As I said, the word does come to us from Italian, but came into there from the Latin word insulātus (which has the root meaning of ‘island’). It happens to be one word I remember from a high-school Latin book; I was fascinated by our word insulation, in which a wire is surrounded by the material, much in the same way water surrounds an island.