I need some help. I am trying to find an origination to the word 'obsequient'. I looked in Oxford and found 'obsequent' and 'obsequious', both with Latin derivation and with the same meaning- 'compliant, yielding, and obedient'. I did a 'Google' search and came up with the word in several places: Finnegan's wake and in an application to join a Scottish Mason group.
Any thoughts or other resources? thanks
Allo Pinkie,
Welcome aBoard! If you go into the "information and announcements" category, you'll find a thread called "useful language links" right at the top of the page. That'll send you off to a whole pile of places where you can look things up.
Good luck.
welcome, pinkie!
it looks like just a variant spelling combination of the two words you mentioned. I couldn't find it in any dictionary, and my net search seemed to find all the same sources as yours. so, that's a lot of help, eh?
".... I am trying to find an origination to the word 'obsequient'..."
Dear pinkie: It is not clear to me what you mean by
"origination". Your mentioning having found it in
Finnegan's Wake suggests you mean earlist usage.
For that you would need access to latest version of OED.
Hello! I am actually trying to locate it in a reputable source- if anyone has access to the English Oxford, I would appreciate them looking to see if it is there. Thanks.
well, I have the 2nd Edition, 1991, and it's not in there... sorry.
Thanks for looking. I work with a physician who is also an informatician (medical informatics) and I am a nursing student in informatics. As he is an expert in reference terminologies (medical), I wanted to get a credible reference to the word to explain my use (oops) of the word. When I found it, I wondered if it was used in error by the references that I found, or if there was a source that would explain this variation. I'll keep searching!
informaticsooh, this ought to spark a little conversation!
consider Joyce:
-- May we petition you, Shaun illustrious, then, to put his prentis' pride in your aproper's purse and to unravel in your own sweet way with words of style to your very and most obsequient, we suggested, with yet an esiop's foible, as to how?
-- Well it is partly my own, isn't it? and you may, ought and welcome, Shaun replied, taking at the same time, as his hunger got the bitter of him, a hearty bite out of the honeycomb of his... hat... Sure, I thunkum you knew all about that... that is... as commonpleas now... as Nelson his trifulgurayous pillar. However. Let me see, do.would you consider this a "credible reference" for the word trifulgurayous?
Hi, pinkie, welcome aBoard! Google gave me 145 hits on obsequient--including Father Steve!:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=obsequientBut, bad news from Onelook, Sweetie:
Sorry, no dictionaries indexed in the selected category contain the word obsequient.
Perhaps you meant:
obsequent (found in 7 dictionaries) http://www.onelook.com/?w=obsequient&ls=aThis sort of rang a bell with me; I thought we had discussed this word here before. But a search turned up nothing.