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divers: msg#00007

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Subject: divers

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The Word of the Day for September 8 is:

divers \DYE-verz\ adjective
: various

Example sentence:
"He is ... descended from the issue of Dudleys who managed
to escape Bloody Mary's ax as well as the divers other perils of
Tudor England." (Christopher Buckley, _Architectural Digest_,
April 1989)

Did you know?
Did you think we had misspelled "diverse"? We
didn't! "Divers" is a word in its own right, albeit a fairly
formal and uncommon one. Both words come from Latin "diversus,"
meaning "turning in opposite directions," and until around 1700
they were pretty much interchangeable -- both meant "various"
and could be pronounced as either DYE-verz (like the plural of
the noun "diver") or dye-VERS. Since then, however, "divers"
(now DYE-verz) has come to emphasize multiplicity. It
means "several" or "of an indefinite number greater than one"
(as in "on divers occasions"). "Diverse" (now dye-VERS)
emphasizes uniqueness. It means "unlike" (as in "a variety of
activities to appeal to the children's diverse interests")
or "having distinct or unlike elements or qualities" ("a diverse
student body").






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