A.Word.A.Day --tessera

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May 28, 2009

This week's theme
Words derived from numbers

This week's words
decussate
hecatomb
atone
tessera
decuman

Tessera

Detail of a mosaic from St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, bottom left corner of:

Photo: Adrian Pingstone

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

tessera

PRONUNCIATION:

(TES-uhr-uh; plural tesserae: TES-uhr-ee)

MEANING:

noun: A small piece of stone, glass, or tile used to make a mosaic.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin, from Greek tesseres, variant of tessares (four), from the four corners of its square shape.

USAGE:

"Like red-stained tessera, the remnants of lost lives come together to compose a vast and shocking mosaic of contemporary life."
Art Gould; Piecing It All Together; The Anniston Star (Alabama); May 10, 2009.

See more usage examples of tessera in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. -Leo Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)

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