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Discuss Email this Feedback RSS/XML Permalink A.Word.A.Day--premorse What happens when you remove the letter "a" from the front of the alphabet? You b-head it. Each of this week's words sprouts another word when you behead it. Go ahead, try it. Decapitate these words. Decollate them. You won't hurt a thing. Nor will the word-police arrest you for verbicide -- destroying (the meaning of) a word -- for in each instance you'll be generating another word, a guaranteed 100% dictionary word. premorse (pri-MORS) adjective Having the end abruptly truncated, as if bitten or broken off. [From Latin praemorsus, from praemordere (to bite in front), from prae- (before), mordere (to bite). Ultimately from the Indo-European root mer- (to rub away or to harm) that is also the source of morse, mordant, amaranth, morbid, mortal, mortgage, and nightmare.] -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "As I looked over the water, I saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling voraciously at the continent, the springing arch of a hill suddenly interrupted, as at Point Alderton -- what botanists might call premorse, -- showing, by its curve against the sky, how much space it must have occupied, where now was water only." Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod; 1865. X-Bonus The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

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