About

Me

Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life. – Proverbs 4:13

Knowledge is the food of the soul. – Plato

A co-worker once told me that I value knowledge. Upon reflection, I think he’s right.

I hope you enjoy the words!

Richard

The Words

I generally select a word that I could not define upon seeing it (sometimes after reading the meaning or origin, I realize that I should have been able to guess the meaning). Words can come from my reading; however, most of the time they come from word-based calendars I receive or email subscriptions to words. The notes and comments regarding the words come from these sources or the Internet, so while I hope they correct, some of the information might be wrong.

Occasionally, I choose a word that I know but that has meanings I don’t know, or else has an interesting history. Once in a rare while, I post words that I happen to know but I don’t think is generally known.

Posts

The posts will contain a word, the pronunciation, the type of speech, and sometimes a comment about the word. After the word will be the definition for the previous day’s word, including when the word was first used in English, as well as the etymology. The definition I provide is based on the reference data; sometimes, they don’t include all of the possible definition. As far as the ‘first used’ year, I divide the centuries into “early” (00-24), “mid” (25-74), and “late” (75-99) century (example: “mid-1800s” or “late 1600s”). If the time spans a century, I’ll note “around <century>” (example: if a word came into English in 1790-1810, I’ll say “around 1800”). On some occasions, I may use “very early” (00-09) or “very late” (90-99). When the ‘first used’ date is after 1900, I provide the decade (for example, 1920s), so if you see “1900s” that means the first decade of the 1900s. On rare occasions, I may provide a specific year; this practice is more common with recent years.

I would really like to have the post update with the meaning, first usage, and etymology, but there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to do this.

Pronunciation

I don’t really have a fixed set of rules; however, I don’t want to use symbols. My preference is to define words phonetically using smaller words; for example, dictionary would be DIK-shun-air-ee, using upper case for the emphasized syllable. I prefer to use fairly well-known one syllable words over a more phonetic spelling (“fuss” rather than “fuhs”). Vowels are the difficult bit of pronunciation. It’s also complicated because English doesn’t just have ‘long’ and ‘short’ vowels (think of lake, father, and sat). I’m going to use “ay” for the long ‘a’ sound (as in lake), “ah” for the sound of the ‘a’ in “father”, and ‘a’ for the short ‘a’ (as in “sat”). I use ‘aye’ for long ‘i’ (and ‘ih’ for the sort ‘i’).