This week’s theme
Well-traveled words

This week’s words
personalty
truchman
popinjay
arsenious
brio

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(ahr-SEE-nee-uhs)

MEANING:

adjective: Relating to or containing arsenic (especially when trivalent).

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old French arsenic, from Latin arsenicum, from Greek arsenikon (yellow orpiment), from Arabic zarnik, from Persian zar (gold). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ghel- (to shine), which also gave us yellow, gold, glimmer, glimpse, glass, gloaming, melancholy, and choleric. Earliest documented use: 1818.

USAGE:

“The next time you’re having a bad day, pause for a moment to be grateful: that you weren’t born in the Victorian age and consequently are not likely to be in danger of being poisoned by arsenic. Come, come, you might be thinking. This is a slender reason to be cheerful -- who’s to say that anyone would wish to slip a splash of arsenious acid into my cup of tea?”
Rebecca Armstrong; Victorian Lives of Poison, Passion, and Peril; The Independent (London, UK); Mar 19, 2010.

“The institute detected an arsenious substance in some of the samples that was later found to be white arsenic.”
Arsenic at Hayashi House ‘Highly toxic’; The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo, Japan); Oct 20, 1998.

See more usage examples of arsenious in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: