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Jan 21, 2011
This week's themeVerbs This week's words intromit remonstrate execrate betide expostulate This week's comments AWADmail 447 Next week's theme Words with no repeating letters Discuss Feedback RSS/XML A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Gargexpostulate
PRONUNCIATION:
(ik-SPOS-chuh-layt)
MEANING:
verb intr.:
To reason earnestly with someone in order to dissuade.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin expostulare (to require), from ex- (intensive prefix) + postulare
(to demand). Ultimately from the Indo-European root prek- (to ask), which is
also the source of words such as pray, precarious, deprecate, postulate, and
precatory. Earliest documented use:
1548.
USAGE:
"'Oh come on,' I expostulated, a shade too loudly. 'That's not fair.'"Sarabjit Jagirdar; Amar's Little Secret; Hindustan Times (New Delhi, India); Feb 7, 2010. See more usage examples of expostulate in Vocabulary.com's dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. -Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745)
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