recrudescence

Pronounced: ree-kroo-DES-uhns, noun

Notes: Not only did I not know this word, I had the pronunciation wrong as well

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Yesterday’s word

The word hyphenate is “a person who performs more than one function” — such as a producer-director in filmmaking.

First usage

Our word came into English in the 1970s (but see the comments)

Background / Comments

As a verb meaning “to hyphen”, our word has been around since the mid-1800s. However, it started life as a noun in the early 1900s to refer to US citizens who would identify their recent foreign nationality as Irish-American or German-American. (As a side note, both Republican and Democratic Presidents of the time were opposed to this practice., including Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — the latter stating A man who thinks himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. ) As noted above, the current meaning came about decades later to describe multiple roles in some related industry. I consider myself a hyphenate in the software industry, being a developer-tester-integrator (as well as some other roles).