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Mar 9, 2018
This week’s theme
Five words that use all letters of the alphabet

This week’s words
expergefaction
vaquero
azymous
whipjack
vendible

vendible
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

vendible

PRONUNCIATION:
(VEN-duh-buhl)

MEANING:
adjective: Salable; marketable.
noun: Something that can be sold.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin vendere, from venum (sale). Ultimately from the Indo-European root wes- (to buy), which is also the source of vend, bazaar, vilify, venal, and monopsony. Earliest documented use: 1384.

USAGE:
“Her first book became a best-seller. The Tenth Muse was listed among the most vendible books in London soon after it was published.”
Amy Alexander; Anne Bradstreet Didn’t know The Definition of Stop; Investor’s Business Daily (Los Angeles, California); May 9, 2008.

“Silence is only commendable in a neat’s* tongue dried and a maid not vendible.”**
William Shakespeare; The Merchant of Venice; 1596.
*neat = bull
**not vendible = not marketable, i.e. not marriageable, i.e. old


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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail. -PZ Myers, biology professor (b. 9 Mar 1957)

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