jaundiced

Pronounced: JAWN-dist, adj

Notes: I didn’t have one definition right

---

Yesterday’s word

The word langueur is “a dull and tedious passage or section (as of a book, play, or musical composition)”. It is usually found in the plural form.

First usage

Our word came into English in the early 1800s

Background / Comments

I have run across, in my reading, passages that are langueurs – as I assume most people have, but I didn’t know that there was a word for it. Our word is pronounced like “longer”, except that the emphasis is on the second syllable. Our word came from the French word longueurs (tedious passages), which came from longueur (length). One of the earliest English uses (perhaps the first) was by Horace Walpole writing about James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.