A.Word.A.Day --snowbroth

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Aug 12, 2013

This week's theme
There's a word for it

This week's words
snowbroth
anatopism
quaternary
elflock
allochthonous

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

If you don't like the world you live in, why not create the kind of world you'd like to live in? Fix what's broken, fill what needs to be filled. The same can be said about words. If you don't have a word to describe what you want to describe, why not dig into a dictionary and find it? Failing that, why not create a word for it?

That's how a language grows, as well as by borrowing and adapting existing words into new meanings, etc. This week we'll feature five words that are already part of the English language, but not well known.

snowbroth

PRONUNCIATION:

(SNO-broth)

MEANING:

noun: Melted snow.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English snaw (snow) + broth (broth). Earliest documented use: 1600.

USAGE:

"Snowballs and snowmen and snowbroth boiled on our tinny fires on the beach."
Christopher Rush; A Twelvemonth and a Day; Canongate Books; 2010.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. -Naguib Mahfouz, writer, Nobel laureate (1911-2006)

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