A.Word.A.Day --elucidatory

A.Word.A.Day

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May 5, 2025

This week’s theme
Words with all the vowels

This week’s words
elucidatory
questionary
cylindraceous
autocephality
quodlibetary

Illustration: Anu Garg + AI

Previous week’s theme
Words that aren’t what they appear to be

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

I 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 below 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:

Shortest word with all five vowels: eunoia
Shortest with all six vowels: oxygeusia
Words with vowels in order: see here, here, and here.
Vowels once and in alphabetical order: see here
All six vowels, any order: see here
Only one vowel (because why not do the opposite): see here

elucidatory

PRONUNCIATION:

(i-LOO/LYOO-si-duh-tuh-ree)

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 does not become a king. The palace becomes a circus. -Elizabeth Bangs, writer (b. 30 Oct 1956)

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