Pronounced: AM-bij, noun
Notes: A new word for me
Yesterday’s word
The word sententious means
- given to or abounding in aphoristic expression or excessive moralizing
- terse in expression in the manner of an aphorism
First usage
Our word came into English in the first half of the 1400s
Background / Comments
As I noted yesterday, I thought our word was spelled “sentitious” and pronounced “sen-TIH-shuhs”. To compound that issue, I thought our word meant “false” or “lying”. Just in case there was a similar word, I checked, and there is no such word as “sentitious”. These days, our word is mostly used in a unflattering sense, implying oversimplification and excessive moralizing. [As an aside, there are times when things are oversimplified, but it is also used falsely; sometimes things really ARE simply, and we prefer to complicate them for our own purposes]. When our word first showed up, it had the idea of “full of meaning”. Our word came from the Latin word sententiosus, which came from sententia (sentence; maxim).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 