mawkish

Pronounced: MAW-kish, adj

Notes: I (pretty much) knew one of the definitions

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Yesterday’s word

The word synecdoche is “a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole (or vice verse).

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1300s

Background / Comments

I am pretty sure that I have used this word before, but not in this blog. In the year before I did this blog, I posted vocabulary words to Facebook, and for a few years before that, I would use the internal chat system at work and put a word in my status. I think I posted this at work because it seems familiar to me. In the sentence “The orphanage had too many mouths to feed”, “mouth” refers to “people” and is thus a synechoche. Our word came from the Latin word synekdoche, which came from the Greek word synekdokhe, which is made up of syn- (together) and ekdokhe (interpretation).