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magniloquent: msg#00025culture.language.word-of-the-day
***************************************************************** Discover the people and events that made history ON THIS DAY. Sign up for the free daily newsletter from Britannica. http://register.britannica.com/mailinglist ***************************************************************** The Word of the Day for July 26 is: magniloquent \mag-NIL-uh-kwunt\ adjective : speaking in or characterized by a high-flown often bombastic style or manner Example sentence: Poet Edward Weismiller told _The Baltimore Sun_ (April 10, 2004) that his former tendency to be magniloquent "was stamped out" of him by his mentor John Berryman. Did you know? "Magnus" means "great" in Latin; "loqui" is a Latin verb meaning "to speak." Combine the two and you get "magniloquus," the Latin predecessor of "magniloquent." English speakers started using "magniloquent" for the bombastic in the 1600s -- even though we'd had its synonym "grandiloquent" since the 1500s. ("Grandiloquent" comes from Latin "grandiloquus," which combines "loqui" and "grandis," another word for "great" in Latin.) Today, these synonyms continue to exist side by side and to be used interchangeably, though "grandiloquent" is the more common of the two. |
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