Word of the day strikes back

[Richard Frost]

Friday, 12th November 2021

denouement

[deɪˈnuːmɒ̃]
NOUN

the final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

"the film's denouement was unsatisfying and ambiguous"

synonyms:
finale · final scene · final act · last act · epilogue · coda · end · ending · finish · close · culmination · climax · conclusion · resolution · solution · clarification · unravelling
the outcome of a situation, when something is decided or made clear.

"I waited by the eighteenth green to see the denouement"

synonyms:
outcome · upshot · consequence · result · end result · end · ending · termination · culmination · climax · issue · success

https://www.bing.com/search?q=define+denouement

[Richard Frost]

Saturday, 13th November 2021

taiga
(taɪgə)

Taiga is the coniferous forest located in the northern regions of the world. It is just south of the tundra.

NOUN
the coniferous forests extending across much of subarctic North America and Eurasia, bordered by tundra to the north and steppe to the south

Word origin
from Russian, of Turkic origin; compare Turkish daǧ mountain

The taiga is a forest of the cold, subarctic region. The subarctic is an area of the Northern Hemisphere that lies just south of the Arctic Circle. The taiga lies between the tundra to the north and temperate forests to the south.

Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia have taigas. In Russia, the world’s largest taiga stretches about 5,800 kilometers (3,600 miles), from the Pacific Ocean to the Ural Mountains. This taiga region was completely glaciated, or covered by glaciers, during the last ice age.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/taiga/

[Richard Frost]

Word of the Day : November 14, 2021

truncate

verb TRUNG-kayt

What It Means
Truncate means "to shorten by or as if by cutting off."

// Many statements in the court document were truncated before publication.

Examples
"[Derrick White] has never logged more than the 68 games he registered in 2019-20, an NBA season interrupted and truncated by the onset of the pandemic." — Jeff McDonald, The San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, 30 Sept. 2021

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of ... 2021-11-09

[Richard Frost]

Monday, November 15th, 2021

wormhole

noun WERM-hohl

What It Means
A wormhole is a hypothetical structure of space-time that is envisioned as a long thin tunnel connecting points that are separated in (well) space and time.

// Some science fiction writers speculate that wormholes are the intergalactic highways of the future.

Examples
"Imagine space as a vast sheet of paper. You live at one end and you want to travel to the other end. Ordinarily you'd have to trudge across the entire length of the page to get there. But what if you folded the paper in half instead? Suddenly, where you are and where you want to be are right next to each other. You simply have to jump that tiny gap. We call these objects wormholes because it is like a worm trying to navigate its way around an apple. To get from the top to the bottom it has two choices: Crawl around the outside, or chew a shortcut through the middle." — Colin Stuart, Space.com, 13 July 2021

Did You Know?
If you associate wormhole with quantum physics and sci-fi, you'll probably be surprised to learn that the word has been around since William Shakespeare's day. To Shakespeare, a "wormhole" was simply a hole made by a worm, but even the Bard subtly linked wormholes to the passage of time; for example, in the poem The Rape of Lucrece, he notes time's destructive power "to fill with worm-holes stately monuments." To modern astrophysicists, a wormhole isn't a tunnel wrought by a slimy invertebrate, but a theoretical tunnel between two black holes or other points in space-time, providing a shortcut between its end points.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

[Sarah]

Word of the day from Susie Dent yesterday:

Word of the day is ‘circumbendibus’ (17th century): an answer or argument so convoluted and evasive that it isn’t really an answer at all.

https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1 ... 34661?s=20

[Sarah]

Word of the day from Susie Dent today:

Word of the day is 'hingum-tringum' (19th-century Scots): feeble and barely presentable; just about hanging together.

https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1 ... 98913?s=20

[Sarah]

Word of the day from Susie Dent today:

Word of the day, on repeat, is ‘latibulate’ (17th century): to hide in a corner until the situation improves.

https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1 ... 80067?s=20

[Sarah]

Word of the day from Susie Dent today:

Word of the day is ‘apanthropy’ (18th century): the desire to be away from other people and to be left alone.

https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1 ... 81381?s=20

[Richard Frost]

3rd December 2021

Omicron

Omicron (/ˈoʊmɪkrɒn, ˈɒmɪkrɒn, oʊˈmaɪkrɒn/; is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: Phoenician ayin.svg. In classical Greek, omicron represented the sound [o] in contrast to omega [ɔː] and ου [oː]. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel /o̞/ . Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O. The word literally means "little O" (o mikron) as opposed to "great O" (ō mega).

[sanity clause]

3rd December 2021

Omicron

Omicron (/ˈoʊmɪkrɒn, ˈɒmɪkrɒn, oʊˈmaɪkrɒn/; is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: Phoenician ayin.svg. In classical Greek, omicron represented the sound [o] in contrast to omega [ɔː] and ου [oː]. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel /o̞/ . Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O. The word literally means "little O" (o mikron) as opposed to "great O" (ō mega).

I thought it was one of the Transformers.