Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The word verbosity comes from Latin verbosus, "wordy". There are many other English words that also refer to the use of excessive words. Prolixity comes from Latin prolixus, "extended". Prolixity can also be used to refer to the length of a monologue or speech, especially a formal address such as a lawyer's oral argument. [2]
In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing. Subsequently, essay has been
Non-standard: After finding the suspected bomb, Pennsylvania state police were called in to diffuse it. [45] desert and dessert. As a verb, desert means to abandon. As a noun, desert is a barren or uninhabited place; an older meaning of the word is "what one deserves", as in the idiom just deserts. A dessert is the last course of a meal.
The Big Friendly Giant (title of a children's book by Roald Dahl); giants are inherently already "big". Prolixity: A phrase may have words which add nothing, or nothing logical or relevant, to the meaning. "I'm going down south." (South is not really "down", it is just drawn that way on maps by convention.) "You can't seem to face up to the facts."
Its first printed use came as early as 1991 in William G. Hawkeswood's "One of the Children: An Ethnography of Identity and Gay Black Men," wherein one of the subjects used the word "tea" to mean ...
On average, each word in the list has 15.38 senses. The sense count does not include the use of terms in phrasal verbs such as "put out" (as in "inconvenienced") and other multiword expressions such as the interjection "get out!", where the word "out" does not have an individual meaning. [6]
As the Black Lives Matter movement remains in the spotlight after the police killing of George Floyd — most visibly in the Portland, Oregon, protests — activists have been raising awareness on ...
A tricolon is a more specific use of the rule of three where three words or phrases are equal in length and grammatical form. [6] A hendiatris is a figure of speech where three successive words are used to express a single central idea. [5] As a slogan or motto, this is known as a tripartite motto. [7]