This week’s theme
Duoliteral words

This week’s words
os
aa
nu
ye
id

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A.Word.A.Day

Please, please, let’s have a week of duoliteral words, pretty please. I’m sure you can find better ones, but let me start off with id, ex, bi (is this a word now?), do (followed by re, mi, fa, etc. -- no maybe not that one), do (as in do, does, did), go ... If you’ve got a Scrabble buff there, they’ll know lots.

PRONUNCIATION:

(aws)

MEANING:

noun:
1. A mouth or an orifice. [plural ora]
2. A bone. [plural ossa]

ETYMOLOGY:

For 1: From Latin os (mouth). Earliest documented use: 1859.
For 2: From Latin os (bone). Earliest documented use: 1400.

NOTES:

It also appears as an abbreviation in many fields, including
Chemistry: Os - symbol for the element osmium
Computing: OS - Operating System
Medicine: OS - left eye (from Latin oculus sinister)
Linguistics: OS - Old Saxon

USAGE:

“Even today, accent suppressants for bands are not uncommon. Robbie Williams doesn’t narrow his os, Aqualungs Matt Hales doesn’t turn his fall into full, and while The Rolling Stones can’t get no satisfaction, they daren’t sing it as their native cant.”
Judy Jarvis; Arctic Monkeys: Neo-Punk Exuberance With an Accent; Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, Pennsylvania); Feb 9, 2006.

“Naturally, the students couldn’t resist testing the teachers’ knowledge. ‘You’d better slow down,’ they would tell some unsuspecting pedagogue, ‘or you might fall and break your os.’”
D.L. Stanley; I Hope This Doesn’t Effectuate Your Dudgeon; Atlanta Inquirer (Georgia); Nov 16, 1996.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: