Category: Word of the Day – L

ETYMOLOGY
as if from libentious (from Latin libentia, from libentem, libens (willing)) + -ous + -ly

EXAMPLE
“…Most-what by Women, sillie Girles, youths, firie-wits, Ambitious,
By great, by needy Mal-Contents, by Credulous, and Vitious,
Work Romes Committees, & from flesh to fare much more delicious
Penance their Puples: whitest Sons these Seedsters and Seditious.
And, that for them libentiously Fooles-Catholike should erre,
Pensions, Canonizing at least, on Rome-wrights they conferre…”

From: A Continuance of Albions England
By William Warner, 1606

ETYMOLOGY
formed by compounding, from loose

EXAMPLE
“…His dam was for certain some loose clackt bitch or other; and he is so far from being tongue tyed, that he walks quite cantipodes to the precept here, see and say nothing…”

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

ETYMOLOGY
from lick (vb.) + spittle (a house or place for the reception of the indigent or diseased)

EXAMPLE
“…Yes – and to hear his lickspittles speak, you would think that a man of great and versatile talents was a miracle; whereas there are some thousands of them publicly acknowledged in England at this day…”

From: Noctes Ambrosianae (J. Wilson) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
Volume XVIII, July-December, 1825

ETYMOLOGY
from Italian leggiadro (elegant, graceful) + -ous

EXAMPLE
“…Her Motions and her Gestures travers’d are
By thy attending thoughts, and ravish’d thou
Think’st silver Venus through her limpid sphere
Swims with less gagliardise, and knows not how
So well to justify her Stile, and prove
Her self the Queen of soft leggiadrous Love…”

From: Psyche, or, Loves Mysterie
By Joseph Beaumont, 1648

ETYMOLOGY
from lither (lazy, sluggish) + -back

EXAMPLE
“…let him be watchfull and able to abide labour, hee must be no litherbacke, vnapt, or slothfull fellow…”

From: Fiftie Godlie and Learned Sermons, Divided Into Five Decades
By Heinrich Bullinger, 1577