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May 5, 2025
This week’s themeWords with all the vowels This week’s words ![]() ![]() Illustration: Anu Garg + AI Previous week’s theme Words that aren’t what they appear to be ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargI like people who practice what they preach. But I love words that do. Take pentasyllabic, a word that both means and is five syllables long. Talk about walking the syllabic walk. (More here) That got me wondering: Why doesn’t the word vowel include all the vowels? Where are a, i, and u hiding? It’s like a party missing half the guests. Let’s fix it. We make some progress with vowelize. But that still leaves it without a and u. How about vowelization? Now all we need is a u. Where do we go from here? Maybe u can help? Share on our website or email us at words@wordsmith.org (include your location: city, state). We’re all ears. And eyes. And sometimes y. In the meantime, we vow to bring you words this week with all vowels: aeiou, and yes, even the sometime-shy y. Some vowely good fun from our archives:
elucidatory
PRONUNCIATION:
MEANING:
adjective: Serving to clarify or explain.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin elucidare (to make clear), from lucid (bright, clear), from
lucere (to shine), from lux (light). Ultimately from the Indo-European
root leuk- (light), which also gave us lunar, lunatic, light, lightning,
lucid, illuminate, illustrate, lustration,
Lucifer, translucent, lux, and lynx. Earliest documented use: 1774.
NOTES:
Something elucidatory is a flashlight in the fog of confusion.
It’s what a good teacher provides, what a user manual tries to be,
and what this very entry hopes to accomplish.
USAGE:
“Fans scrambled to decode and catalogue all this information online,
providing elucidatory footnotes.” Rachel Aroesti; From Baby Reindeer to Taylor Swift, How Amateur Sleuths Ruined Pop Culture; The Guardian (London, UK); May 25, 2024. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace
turns into a circus. -Turkish Proverb
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