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Jun 15, 2009
This week's themeMedicinal words to describe people This week's words choleric phlegmatic sanguine melancholic bilious Four temperaments 
Woodcut from Physiognomische Fragmente by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1775
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with Anu GargAncient medical practitioners believed that a healthy body had a balance of four essential fluids, also known as humors (from Latin humere: to be wet, which also gave us the word humid). Those humors were blood, yellow bile (aka choler), black bile, and phlegm. Each humor was associated with a season and an element (air, water, fire, and earth). An imbalance of humors was thought to cause a change in temperament or worse. Thankfully, we have come a long way from that theory about the human body. We no longer use that method to diagnose people's conditions, though the terms live on in the language by being used as metaphors. choleric
PRONUNCIATION:
(KAHL-uhr-ik)
MEANING:
adjective:
Easily irritated or angered; hot-tempered.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin cholericus, from Greek cholerikos, from chole (bile). Ultimately
from the Indo-European root ghel- (to shine) that is also the source of words
such as yellow, gold, glimmer, gloaming, glimpse, glass, arsenic, and cholera.
USAGE:
"In every choleric outburst from Sir Alan, every lifted eyebrow and pursed
lip from his lieutenants, the subtext is clear."Libby Purves; The Apprentice; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Jun 6, 2009. See more usage examples of choleric in Vocabulary.com's dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. -Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort, writer (1741-1794)
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