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May 17, 2013
This week's theme
Verbs

This week's words
ensconce
equivocate
petrify
impute
exscind

This week's comments
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Next week's theme
Words coined after mountains and hills
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

exscind

PRONUNCIATION:
(ek-SIND)

MEANING:
verb tr.: To cut out or off.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin exscindere, from ex- (out) + scindere (to cut). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to cut or split), which also gave us excise, schism, ski, shin, scienter, and adscititious. Earliest documented use: 1662.

USAGE:
"The knife skipped off the stone and almost exscinded Shih Te's index finger."
Alexander Goldstein; The Foundling; Trafford; 2009.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. -William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)

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