Author: Lexico

Word of the Day: ROTUNDANT

ETYMOLOGY
from rotund (adj.) + -ant, after quadrant

EXAMPLE
“…He is a good anatomist to scrue into the very center of a loaf, and to pry into the joynt of separation. A good surveyour only, he measures not by the chaine nor the quadrant, no, by the retundant* rather, i.e. the jugg…”

From: Confused Characters of Conceited Coxcombs, 
Or, A Dish of Traitorous Tyrants
K.W., 1661

Note: – * ‘retundant’ as shown in the above example is correct
– The Oxford English Dictionary only shows ‘rotundant’ as a noun.
However, there are examples of it being used as an adjective, as in this example from 1846:
“…“Oh!” exclaimed the rotundant figure of the queen…”

Word of the Day: FLAMBUGINOUS

ETYMOLOGY
– a burlesque formation on flam (a fanciful notion, caprice, whim obs.)

EXAMPLE
“…To these were added a number of the minor order of exhibitors. In one place you saw the miraculous and flambuginous sea-monster, known by the name of the Non-Descript. Next to it stood the Musical Rat, which played most divinely on the mouth-organ…”

From: The Sporting Magazine of the Transactions of The Turf, The Chase,
And every other Diversion Interesting to the Man of Pleasure, Enterprize, and Spirit.
Volume 42, 1813
Easter Amusements of the Year 1813

Word of the Day: DILLY-DAW

ETYMOLOGY
– from dilly as in dilly-dally + daw (n. a slattern, an untidy woman)

EXAMPLE
“…An’ is it no angersome to see her like a dilly daw, an’ bits o’ creatures that she could keep at her fire-side, buskit up like Flanders-babies?…”

From: The Saxon and the Gaël, Or, The Northern Metropolis
Christian Isobel Johnstone, 1814

Word of the Day: ABRODIETICAL

ETYMOLOGY
– from Greek ἁβροδίαιτος (living delicately),
from ἁβρός (graceful, delicate) + δίαιτα (diet [way of feeding]) + -ical 

EXAMPLE
“…Good lack a day, what pity ’tis such an abrodietical Person should want wherewith to accrew…”

From: A Very Good Wife: a Comedy
George Powell, 1693

Word of the Day: QUAKE-BUTTOCK

ETYMOLOGY
– from quake + buttock

EXAMPLE
“…I rush’d into the world, which is indeed much like
The art of swimming, he that will attain to’t
Must fall plump, and duck himself at first,
And that will make him hardy and adventurous;
And not stand putting in one foot, and shiver,
And then draw t’other after, like a quake-buttock;
Well he may make a padler i’ the world,
From hand to mouth, but never a brave swimmer…”

From: (of uncertain date and authorship)

Wit at Severall Weapons, A Comedy, Act I,
W. Rowley and T. Middleton, a1627,
and in Comedies and Tragedies
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, 1647

Word of the Day: EXCEREBROSE

ETYMOLOGY
from ex- (prefix) + Latin cerebrum (brain) + -ose

EXAMPLE
“…It brands him at once as an excerebrose scallywag, an eviscerated elasmobranch, worthy of being hurled neck and crop along with Mendelssohn into the limbo of discredit desuetude…“

From: The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular,
Volume XXXVII, 1896

Word of the Day: LOGOLATRY

ETYMOLOGY
from Greek λόγος (word) + -latry

EXAMPLE
“…but one fanciful process of hypostasizing logical conceptions and generic terms? In Proclus it is Logolatry run mad…”

From: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1839, Volume IV
Notes on Whitaker’s Origin of Arianism Disclosed. 1810. Chapter I.

Word of the Day: PHILOCALIST

ETYMOLOGY
– from ancient Greek ϕιλόκαλος (loving the beautiful);
from ϕιλο- (philo-) + καλός (beautiful) + –ist (suffix)

EXAMPLE
“…This poor, vindictive, solitary, and powerful creature, was a philocalist: he had a singular love of flowers and of beautiful women.”

From: Horae Subsecivae
Locke and Sydenham, with other occasional papers
By John Brown · 1858