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Permanent link for this word: lucriferous

Aug 28, 2012

This week's theme
Usage examples that are food for thought

This week's words
salutary
lucriferous
pugilist
strop
concomitant

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

lucriferous

PRONUNCIATION:

(loo-KRIF-uhr-uhs)

MEANING:

adjective: Lucrative, profitable.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin lucrum (profit) + -ferous (producing). Earliest documented use: 1648.

USAGE:

"Freed from any ambition to leave my heirs rich, I had no need to pursue lucriferous experiments, to which I so much preferred luciferous [providing light or insight] ones."
Chemist and physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691), who gave us Boyle's Law of gases, in a letter to John Locke, 17th c.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

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