Pronounced: vir-ih-DESS-uhnt, adj
Notes: Another strike for the poor quality control on this entry; it was clearly an adjective from the definition, but was listed as a noun.
Yesterday’s word
The word spavined means
- suffering from spavin, a disease involving swelling of the hock joints in a horse
- old; decrepit; broken-down
First usage
Our word came into English in the mid-1400s
Background / Comments
This is one of the word in which it is easy to follow the definition as it changed. Clearly, the first definition above was the original definition. Probably older horses were more common to this condition, and that gave rise to the more general definition listed second above. Our word comes from the Old French word espavain (swelling).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 