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A.Word.A.Day--omnifarious

Have you ever opened a dictionary to look up a word, only to find yourself distracted by another word on the page? The definition of that word steers you to yet another, some two hundred pages ahead, and before you know it your fingers are cavorting as if in a random dance on the leaves of the lexicon.

This week's words in AWAD are chosen by following precisely that route. I think Brownian motion (yes, that's an eponym you may like to look up) is the best way to describes what happens when a linguaphile casually opens a dictionary.

omnifarious (om-ni-FAR-ee-uhs) adjective

Of all kinds or sorts.

[From Late Latin omnifarius, from Latin omni- (all) + -farius.]

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

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"I am having an affair. My wife knows about it. How could she not, considering all the afternoons I'm away from home, working at satisfying my extracurricular passion? From all this I experience emotions quite omnifarious, from joy to anger to frustration to deep love. And it's been going on for 30 years. It's golf I'm talking about." Hubert Mizell; Only One Sport is Worthy of Undying Love; St. Petersburg Times (Florida); Aug 16, 1988.

X-Bonus