This week’s theme
There’s a word for it

This week’s words
nemophilist
spindrift
mononymous
noctivagant
betweenity


This week’s comments
AWADmail 1084

Next week’s theme
Words about words

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(bi-TWEE-ni-tee)

MEANING:

noun: The state of lying in the interval separating two conditions, qualities, extremes, etc.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English betweonum (between), from be- (by) + tweon (two each). Earliest documented use: 1760.

NOTES:

The word was coined by the novelist Horace Walpole who also gave us serendipity. Both words were coined in letters to friends. Describing a house, he wrote, “The house is not Gothic, but of that betweenity, that intervened when Gothic declined and Palladian was creeping in.”

USAGE:

“Several years ago, very much between books, I was struggling to come to terms with the interplay between political culture and contemporary communications ... More recently -- and to stress the serendipity of betweenity -- I was idly looking out the window of a train in western Australia when the structure of a volume (bringing together previously published essays with new ones) magically presented itself.”
Robert Schmuhl; Filling the Fallow Period Between Writing Books; Chicago Tribune (Illinois); Aug 12, 2001.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: