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Jan 15, 2025
This week’s theme
Words with double lives

This week’s words
automania
airhead
monophagy

monophagy
Illustration: Anu Garg + AI

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

monophagy

PRONUNCIATION:
(muh-NAH-fuh-jee)

MEANING:
noun:
1. The eating of only one kind of food.
2. The act of eating alone.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek mono- (one) + -phagy (eating). Earliest documented use: 1625.

USAGE:
“I feel your pain, but monophagy isn’t a diet that anyone is recommending. ... Mike Roman, from Hackensack, New Jersey, says he has eaten a plain cheese pizza for dinner every night for the past 37 years, since he was four.”
That’s Monophagous: the Woman Who Drinks Nothing but Pepsi and Has Done for the Past 64 Years; The Guardian (London, UK); Oct 16, 2018.

“Monophagy makes a man melancholy and unsocial. ... If a man dines alone, and has a good dinner, how can he praise it properly if he does not praise it on the spot.”
George Webbe Dasent; Three to One, Vol. 2; Chapman and Hall; 1872.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. -Moliere, actor and playwright (15 Jan 1622-1673)

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