This week’s theme
Contranyms

This week’s words
dabster
salad days
depthless
grog
sententious

This week’s comments
AWADmail 737

Next week’s theme
Words related to food

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(sen-TEN-shuhs)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Full of pithy expressions.
2. Full of pompous moralizing.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin sententia (opinion), from sentire (to feel or to have an opinion). Some other words derived from the same root are: sense, sentence, sentiment, sentinel, assent, consent, dissent, and resent. Earliest documented use: 1440.

USAGE:

“Sizzlingly smart and agreeably sententious, Mr. Garland’s film transcends some all-too-human imperfections with gorgeous images, astute writing, and memorably strong performances.”
Joe Morgenstern; Stylish ‘Machina’ Artfully Programmed for Pleasure; The Wall Street Journal (New York); Apr 10, 2015.

“In [Walden’s] first chapter, ‘Economy’, Thoreau lays out a program of abstinence so thoroughgoing as to make the Dalai Lama look like a Kardashian. (That chapter must be one of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than eighty pages long.)”
Kathryn Schulz; Pond Scum; The New Yorker; Oct 19, 2015.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: