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Apr 10, 2015
This week’s theme
Kangaroo words

This week’s words
quiescent
catacomb
perambulate
expurgate
frangible

frangible nut
Frangible nut
Photo: langleyo

Kangaroos & their joeys
quiescent: quiet
catacomb: tomb
perambulate: amble, ramble
expurgate: purge
frangible: fragile: frail

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

frangible

PRONUNCIATION:
(FRAN-juh-buhl)

MEANING:
adjective: Readily broken; breakable.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin frangere (to break) which also gave us fraction, refract, chamfer, defray, infringe, and fracture. Earliest documented use: 1440.

USAGE:
“The foot is at such high risk for injury largely because it has so many small, frangible parts -- 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 tendons, ligaments, and muscles, any of which can fail.”
Gretchen Reynolds; Unhappy Feet; The New York Times; Sep 14, 2008.

See more usage examples of frangible in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

The word “frangible” has three generations of kangaroos: its joey “fragile” which in turn has its own little one “frail”. Can you think of other words like that?
How many joeys were you able to identify this week?

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott, writer (b. 10 Apr 1954) [attributed to Tom Weston]

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