Pronounced: roh-mahn-ah-KLAY, noun
Notes: I know a part of this phrase, but not this one
Yesterday’s word
The word scabrous means
- rough; having small raised dots or scales
- salacious
- difficult to deal with; knotty
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1500s
Background / Comments
I thought our word meant “like a scab”, which possibly fist the first definition; however, the second and third definitions are pretty much new to me. As I write this, I seem to recall reading the phrase “a scabrous problem” somewhere, which uses the third definition. Our word came from the Latin word scaber (rough).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 