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exhausted (slang) (US: dead tired) an idler; someone who does not pay their debts, often in construction ("deadbeat dad") (slang) DC Detective Constable, a police officer who works in or with a branch of CID. direct current (see also other expansions) District of Columbia: deck (n.) the floor or level of a ship or other types of vehicles
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, [1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
Elegant variation, unnecessary use of synonyms; Euphuism, deliberate excess of literary devices fashionable in 1580s English prose; Order of the Occult Hand, a group of journalists who sneak the phrase "It was as if an occult hand had…" into published copy; Verbosity, in which a speech or writing uses more words than is necessary
An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym , with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Entopic graphomania is a surrealist drawing exercise designed to highlight patterns and meaning in pieces of paper, including newspapers, blank pieces of copy paper, and pages of a book. [10] The process consists of closely examining a page for distinguishing features (folds, creases, blank spaces) and marking them with a writing utensil.