# Looking up words



## Olly Buckle (Jan 3, 2018)

When words I don't know pop up in my reading I look them up, I am guessing I am not the only one. Next time you do it how about putting them here? I'll start:-

I just came across 'Philoprogenitive', it means 'having many offspring'.


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## escorial (Jan 3, 2018)

when i have to look up words i never think i'll use that sometime....


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## Bloggsworth (Jan 3, 2018)

Olly Buckle said:


> When words I don't know pop up in my reading I look them up, I am guessing I am not the only one. Next time you do it how about putting them here? I'll start:-
> 
> I just came across 'Philoprogenitive', it means 'having many offspring'.



And clearly being philisophical about it...


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## Aquarius (Jan 3, 2018)

It also means loving and liking one's offspring, which by no means all parents do.


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 3, 2018)

escorial said:


> when i have to look up words i never think i'll use that sometime....


It's not using it, it's coming acrossit again. I don't know why, but it seems you have never heard of a word in seventy years and then it turns up severl times in a short period.

What I try to do is write the page no. in the front of the book in pencil and mark the margin where the word is, then I can look them up later and rub it all out. That's the theory, first find a pencil, dictionary is easier, one day I'll get a smart phone.


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## Book Cook (Jan 7, 2018)

I always look up the word. It can get tiring, because even when I can glean the meaning from the context, I still need to see the exact definition and what other meanings it might carry. Even when it comes to some abstract words that I already know, I need to revisit the definitions when I eventually come across them.


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## escorial (Jan 7, 2018)

yur never to old to learn an looking up words makes it logical.....philosify books our bursting with those words and i must say writers like steinbeck,yates to name just two must have catered for my level...an i thank them if they did....


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## -xXx- (Jan 11, 2018)

per first-word-that-comes-to-mind

dereference

_computing_
Obtain the address of a data item held in another location from (a pointer).


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 13, 2018)

archepiscopal, alternative form archiepiscopal.

Of or pertaining to an archbishop, or archbishopric. I knew episcopal had Protestant Church connections, I now realise it refers to Bishops or Bishoprics. Does the Catholic church only have cardinals and a Pope I wonder? I am not sure I am interested enough to find out


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## escorial (Jan 13, 2018)

how do words evolve an who decides if it makes the grade....


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 13, 2018)

escorial said:


> how do words evolve an who decides if it makes the grade....



Now that strikes me as a subject worthy of a thread all to itself. 

How do you mean 'evolve'?
For example 'meat' in the fourteenth century meant tha same as 'food', so words like mincemeat, made of minced fruit. It continued to do so for several hundred years , despite the separate meaning of 'flesh' being used concurrently. So the meaning evolves. One can see that in words like 'Gay' or 'Literally'. Nobody would understand, 'When I told her I was gay she literally went through the roof' to  mean 'When I told her I was joyful she rose bodily through the roof', and though we may classify it as 'wrong'  there is a good chance that in fifty years the more dated present meanings of those words will be regarded as completely obsolete.

On the other hand there is a root 'mad' that means something is 'moist' and gives rise to words in Sanskrit meaning fat and in Gothic, Old German, Saxon and Norse with with similar meanings of some sort of food, and pronounced similarly.

Now, that is one, simple, four letter word, maybe etymology deserves its own forum rather than a thread 

One thing about changing language, the rate of change is slowed considerably by literacy. A study of non-literate Amazonian societies showed a change in the majority of ordinary nouns over a relatively short period. To me this is illustrated in our society by slang words, the words that don't usually get written even in a literate society, thus a 'spliff' becomes a 'joint' becomes a 'doobie' becomes a 'blunt', and probably severl others, all within my lifetime


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## escorial (Jan 13, 2018)

english words and language change all the time an it blows my mind how words are written and spoke compared with say shakespeares era....were are the influences..how does it evolve..mind boggling stuff


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 19, 2018)

inanition; exhaustion caused by lack of nourishment.


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 19, 2018)

escorial said:


> english words and language change all the time an it blows my mind how words are written and spoke compared with say shakespeares era....were are the influences..how does it evolve..mind boggling stuff



Think Chinese whispers  The way the spoken words differ is not nearly so pronounced (pun intended) since the first world war when people from different parts of the country came together with accents that were so different they could barely understand each other. That was closely followed by Radio and BBC English which came to be understood everywhere, even if people did not speak it. Like writing mass media has slowed change down, but it also means that when when a new usage gets accepted it is quickly broadcast far and wide instead of remaining a local phenomenon. 

Sometimes words change quite quickly though, a writer of the 1960's I was reading saw no future for many 'new' words made by adding 'ise' to the end. Cubicalise, to turn an area into cubicals he saw a future for, because people were doing it all the time. Hospitalise he thought would dissappear, because the war time demand for temporary hospitals had just about disappeared. He was using it in the (to him) obvious meaning of 'To turn into a hospital', to use it to mean 'Put into a hospital' simply did not occur to him. That is the thing that really gets me, there is no predicting the future as far as language is concerned, no working developmental theories, no laws, nothing, compare that to almost any other study from  chemistry to astro-physics!


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## dale (Jan 19, 2018)

I learned a new word the other day. "Callipgyian". So I decided to use it a sentence on a girl and told her smiling she was very Callipgyian.  She smiled. Not sure she knew what I was talking about, though.


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## Garvan (Jan 20, 2018)

Language is getting stupider. If the wold wide sharing of good language skills can slow the decay then I am up for it.


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## -xXx- (Jan 20, 2018)

callypgyian (adj)

"of, pertaining to, or having beautiful buttocks," 1800, Latinized from Greek _kallipygos_, name of a statue of Aphrodite at Syracuse, from _kalli-_ , combining form of _kallos_ "beauty" (see Callisto) + _pyge_ "rump, buttocks." Sir Thomas Browne (1646) refers to "Callipygæ and women largely composed behinde."

thanks to etymology online for the above.
i'll be using the "_pyge_" part more, for sure.
jussayin'


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## Olly Buckle (Feb 26, 2018)

Garvan said:


> Language is getting stupider. If the wold wide sharing of good language skills can slow the decay then I am up for it.



There is always someone feels this, I have found it reading Roman history, right through to nineteenth century grammarians, via fifteenth sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. They always seem to feel it is going downhill all the way and soon men will be reduced to the grunts of animals, but it seems to be taking a bit longer than expected. Perhaps it is simply change, and those who protestr are the sort who don't like change, or recognise it as a sort of progress. Your footnote does mark you as being exceptional, ie different from most.


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## Olly Buckle (Feb 26, 2018)

Recused.

When a judge or juror is removed from a case because he may have some involvement he is said to  be recused, or to have recused himself.


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## sas (Feb 26, 2018)

dale said:


> I learned a new word the other day. "Callipgyian". So I decided to use it a sentence on a girl and told her smiling she was very Callipgyian.  She smiled. Not sure she knew what I was talking about, though.



When young, a guy told me I was like a Renaissance woman. I was such a Renaissance woman I had no idea what he was talking about, and said so. He was older, more cultured and better educated. He explained that he could take me anywhere and I'd fit in. He taught me craps.


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## Olly Buckle (Feb 28, 2018)

Concatenation, a chain, as in a chain of events, or almost anything joined in that way. To concatenate, to jpoin up, to associate.


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## Olly Buckle (Mar 19, 2018)

Charivari. 'The rough music of kettles and pans'. The dictionary gives it as 'to celebrate weddings', I found it as being played by metal  workers for a medieval play in York about Joseph coming home and finding his wife pregnant. The people's plays were a sort of down to earth version of the bible stories.


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## Olly Buckle (Mar 21, 2018)

Anchorite and anchoress, man and woman.
In the Middle Ages they were individuals who took up a hermit like life, taking vows in church and retiring to a cell for a life of piety and prayer. Unlike hermits though they were not acting as individuals, but were supported by the church and the establishment who saw their piety as the anchor that kept the faith and Church steady against the devil’s attempts to rock it.


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## -xXx- (Mar 22, 2018)

rep button fail.
consider yourself kudo-ed.
this has been a recent reexploration topic for me as well.
_*plays PINK FLOYD*
*in the waaaay background*_


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## Olly Buckle (Mar 24, 2018)

*plays PINK FLOYD*
*in the waaaay background*

'Crazy diamond' ?

atelier  They say an artist's workshop. The reference I had was to a women's embroidery and general workroom, and I get the impression it refers more to the arts and crafts workshop school of art than the fine art studio, but I may be completely wrong.


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## -xXx- (Mar 27, 2018)

online etymology:
atelier (n)
"workshop," especially the workroom or studio of a sculptor or painter, 1840, from French atelier "workshop," from Old French astelier "(carpenter's) workshop, woodpile" (14c.), from astele "piece of wood, a shaving, splinter," which is probably from Late Latin hastella "a thin stick," diminutive of hasta "spear, shaft"


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