concupiscence

Pronounced: kon-KYOO-pih-suhns, noun

Notes: This word I am familiar with, but could not precisely define it – I don’t think it’s well known

---

Yesterday’s word

The word greenmail is “the practice of buying enough of a company’s stock to threaten a hostile takeover and then reselling it to the company at an above-market price”

First usage

Our word came into English in the 1980s

Background / Comments

I don’t spend a lot of time reading about corporate takeovers or even would-be takeovers, or else I may have known our word. The “green” part of our word goes back to 1862 when the US government began to use green ink to print paper money — it wasn’t long until “green” referred to money. The “mail” part is much older; it goes back to the late 1000s where is meant “payment” or “rent”. It survives in the 1500s word “blackmail” – a payment that Scottish border chiefs extracted in exchange for immunity from pillage.