A.Word.A.Day --exordium

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Feb 9, 2015

This week’s theme
Random words

This week’s words
exordium
recrudescence
opprobrium
comportment
solicitude

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

It’s nice to see more and more of the world’s information getting organized -- sorted, indexed, and cataloged -- making it easy to find. We now know more of what is where and how to access it.

But there’s something to be said about serendipity. Sometimes there’s no substitute for walking into a random aisle in a library and perusing books. Sometimes, getting lost results in finding what you may need.

In that spirit, this week’s words have been selected randomly, by getting lost in the dictionary and landing on a word. If you need more, we have a way for you to see a word at random from A.Word.A.Day archives.

exordium

PRONUNCIATION:

(ig/eg-ZOR-dee-uhm, ik-SOR-)

MEANING:

noun: The beginning or introductory part of anything, especially of a discourse, treatise, etc.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin ex- (out, from) + ordiri (to begin). Earliest documented use: 1531.

USAGE:

“Reading the OED ... is described in the author’s exordium with ‘I have read the OED so that you don’t have to.’”
William Safire; Presents of Mind; The New York Times Magazine; Jun 22, 2008.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet. -Alice Walker, author (b. 9 Feb 1944)

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