temporize

Pronounced: TEM-puh-rize, verb

Note: This is a “borderline” word; I have run across it and had a sense of the meaning, but wasn’t quite right.

Yesterday’s word

The word lustrate means

  • “to purify by means of rituals or ceremonies”
  • “To remove undesirable people from an organization, especially in an abrupt or violent manner”
Background

My instincts about this word were correct; it does have the root of “light”; it comes from Latin lustrare “to make bright”. It contains the root word meaning “light”. I suppose (though the material I have doesn’t say) that when something was purified, it was brighter, and that is how that sense came to be.

First Usage

This word showed up in the early 1600s.

lustrate

Pronounced: LUHS-trate, verb

Note: When I saw this word, I saw the ‘lus-‘ and thought it had something to do with light… not quite right.

Yesterday’s word

The word espiègle means “frolicsome; roguish”

Background

The word comes from the French language, as you might think. It is a corruption of Ulespiegle – the French name for a peasant German prankster, Till Eulenspiegel. The tales of this prankster were translated into French and then English in the mid-1500s, but our word didn’t show up until later (see below).

First usage

Sir Walter Scott introduced the word in the 1800s, and other writers began using it.

repeat, iterate, reiterate

As a kind of Christmas present, I’m posting this not-quite-a-vocabulary word entry. I know the meaning of all of these words, but there are shades of meaning that I found interesting.

The word repeat means to do something again, or to have something happen again. Note that only one recurrence is enough to be a considered a repeat.

The word iterate, however, implies a larger set. It implies repetition in a bit of an impersonal way. In programming, one can iterate over a set of data, performing the same steps on each item.

The word reiterate implies a sense of repetition with weariness.

The word repeat came into English first, in the mid-1300s; oddly enough, reiterate was next, in the 1400s, followed by iterate in the mid-1500s.

I found the information about interesting, and thus a good candidate for this site.

resistentialism (example entry)

This is an example of the kind of entries I do. I chose this entry because the background information was particularly interesting to me.

I’d appreciate feedback on the layout; I have a lot more options for formatting here than I have on Facebook.

Pronounced: rih-zis-TEN-shul-iz-um

Type of speech: noun

Comment: This word is hard to take seriously, but many workers firmly believe in it (that’s all I’ll say until I give the definition tomorrow).

Yesterday’s word

The word bissextile year means “a leap year”.

Background

This word has an interesting history: When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, he added a day to February every four years (as we still do); however, he added it after the 24th day of February. In the Roman system, the days toward the end of the month were reckoned by counting backward from the first of the following month. In addition, the Romans counted both beginning and ending days. Thus, the 24th of February was six days before 01 March, and was thus known as ‘sextus’ (sixth day). In leap year, there was a second ‘sextus’, or ‘bissextus’… and thus our word, even though we today have the extra day at the end of February, making the origin odd.

Usage

This word came into English in the late 1500s.