A.Word.A.Day --retral

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Jul 17, 2017

This week’s theme
Random words

This week’s words
retral
lateritious
coadjutant
empyrean
niveous

Image: Pete Jelliffe

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

A saying goes: If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten. Which makes sense, unless you are generating random numbers (the “true” kind).

Well, today we’ve picked some random words for this week’s A.Word.A.Day. As the human mind can find design in random patterns -- animals in star clusters, Jesus on toast, and messages in a record played in reverse (see pareidolia) -- so may you find some connections among these words.

You can get a random word from A.Word.A.Day archives at any time here.

retral

PRONUNCIATION:

(REE-truhl, RE-)

MEANING:

adjective: 1. Located at the back. 2. Backward.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin retro (back). Earliest documented use: 1822.

USAGE:

“Donley and Lindsay worked their way to retral chairs furthest from the speaker.”
J.M. Barlog; Necessary Measures; BAK Books; 1997.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that buried its head in the sand waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education, or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and timeless absence of moral leadership. We must dissent, because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better. -Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice (1908-1993)

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