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divers: msg#00007culture.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 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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