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Feb 21, 2025
This week’s theme
Words with multiple personas

This week’s words
onolatry
grizzle
polyphony
bibble
jactation

jactation
Illustration: Anu Garg + AI

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

jactation

PRONUNCIATION:
(jak-TAY-shuhn)

MEANING:
noun:
1. Boasting.
2. Involuntary bodily movements, such as tossing or twitching.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin jactation (tossing, boasting), from jactare (to throw, boast), frequentative of jacere (to throw). Earliest documented use: 1576. Also spelled as jactitation.

USAGE:
“The girls from the legal pools and the courthouse clerks stood out on the sidewalks [and] engaged in conceited jactation ... Most of the talk had little to do with actual facts.”
Patricia Hickman; Katrina’s Wings; Five Star; 2002.

“Amidst all the pain, and relentless jactation of his body, Laurel thought he could still hear the man.”
Emma Porter; The Fairy King; Xlibris; 2019.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard's vote. -David Foster Wallace, novelist, essayist, and short story writer (21 Feb 1962-2008)

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