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Jul 3, 2001
This week's themeWords ending in eric This week's words generic choleric congeneric neoteric suberic Four temperaments Woodcut from Physiognomische Fragmente by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1775
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PRONUNCIATION:
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:
"Continually throwing off cuttings from its mown prose, the novel delights
in word-play. Umeed is, at times, an angry photographer, `a choleric
snappeur,' who resents playing second fiddle to the brilliant spectacle,
and final demise, of Ormus and Vina: `second-fiddling while Rome burns'." James Wood, Books: Review: The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian (London, UK), Apr 3, 1999. See more usage examples of choleric in Vocabulary.com's dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
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