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Currently words displayed = 11

provenance \PROV-uh-nuhn(t)s\, noun:

Origin; source

>> In a world awash in information of dubious provenance, whom can you trust to tell you the truth?
>> There may have been as many as one hundred antique statues of Roman provenance in the city at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
>> The provenance of his possessions traced back to dukes and duchesses, kings, queens, czars, emperors, and dictators.

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microcosm \MY-kruh-koz-uhm\, noun:

1. A little world. Hence, man or human nature as a supposed epitome of the world or universe (compare macrocosm).
2. A smaller, representative system having analogies to a larger system.

>> The monarch and his followers thought of the court as a microcosm of how the kingdom ought to be, the harmonious _expression of a social order centred on the monarch.
>> There is a classic Jimmy Stewart movie, Magic Town, about "Grandview," a small town in the Midwest that is a perfect statistical microcosm of the United States, a place where the citizens' opinions match perfectly with Gallup polls of the entire nation.
>> New York saw itself as a quasi-independent political and cultural entity that was both a microcosm of and a model for the nation as a whole.

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gloaming \GLOH-ming\, noun:

Twilight; dusk.

>> The children squealed and waved and smiled, their teeth flashing white in the gloaming.
>> It was the gloaming, when a man cannot make out if the nebulous figure he glimpses in the shadows is angel or demon, when the face of evening is stained by red clouds and wounded by lights.
>> Arrived at the village station on a wintry evening, when the gloaming is punctuated by the cheery household lamps, shining here and there like golden stars, through the leafless trees.

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luminary \LOO-muh-nair-ee\, noun:

1. Any body that gives light, especially one of the heavenly bodies.
2. A person of eminence or brilliant achievement.

>> Those who came to the Pyrenees sought the sublime in the mountains and the exotic in the population, drawn by the descriptions of ethnographers and literary luminaries like Vigny, Sand, Baudelaire and Flaubert.
>> . . .such jazz luminaries as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Armstrong, and Earl Hines.
>> There's something comforting in those occasional lapses when a luminary lurches and trips over the humble stone his powerful torch somehow failed to reveal.

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daedal \DEE-duhl\, adjective:

1. Complex or ingenious in form or function; intricate.
2. Skillful; artistic; ingenious.
3. Rich; adorned with many things.

>> Most Web-site designers realize that large image maps and daedal layouts are to be avoided, and the leading World Wide Web designers have reacted to users' objections to highly graphical, slow sites by using uncluttered, easy-to-use layouts.
>> He gathered toward the end of his life a very extensive collection of illustrated books and illuminated manuscripts, and took heightened pleasure in their daedal patterns as his own strength declined.

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temerity \tuh-MER-uh-tee\, noun:

Unreasonable or foolhardy contempt of danger; rashness.

>> The elaborate caution with which the British commander now proceeded stands out in striking contrast with the temerity of his advance upon Bunker Hill in the preceding year.
>> When English merchants had the temerity to set up a trading post or 'factory' -- junior merchants were known as factors -- the Dutchmen defended their monopoly by massacring them.
>> Drivers with the temerity to accelerate out of turns are likely to encounter torque steer, an unsettling glitch in control as the engine fights to take charge of the steering.
>> Throughout the anti-trust trial its executives treated the courts and the US government with sneering contempt, coupled with a ratty annoyance that any public authority should have the temerity to interfere in its business.

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wag \WAG\, noun:

A humorous person; a wit; a joker.

>> The master of ceremonies was one Boston, a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness.
>> Yet the fate of all three reformers was more or less the same. Washington remained much as it had been before. ("Only more so," a wag might add.)
>> Some wag has summed up the three laws of thermodynamics in everyday terms: 1. You can't win. 2. You can't even break even. 3. You can't get out of the game.

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execrable \EK-sih-kruh-buhl\, adjective:

1. Deserving to be execrated; detestable; abominable.
2. Extremely bad; of very poor quality; very inferior.

>> His human-rights record was abysmal. His relations with Washington were adversarial. He rivaled Zimbabwe's execrable Robert Mugabe for the title "Africa's Saddam."
>> For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.
>> Any theatergoer who has ever felt the urge to murder an actor for an execrable performance should get a kick out of two backstage mysteries that do the deed with a nice theatrical flourish.
>> The decision to level the ancient cathedral is described candidly by one latter-day authoritative guidebook as having demonstrated "execrable taste."

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rapine \RAP-in\, noun:

The act of plundering; the seizing and carrying away of another's property by force.

>> He who has once begun to live by rapine always finds reasons for taking what is not his.
>> Extortion and rapine are poor providers.
>> The war, proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison, was one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine - marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity."

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aspersion \uh-SPUR-zhuhn; -shuhn\, noun:

1. A damaging or derogatory remark; slander.
2. The act of defaming or slandering.
3. A sprinkling with water, especially in religious ceremonies.

>> Orley had once been forced to resign from a local men's club for casting aspersions on the character of another member's wife.
>> Its meetings were fiercely argumentative; members seemed to love nothing better than to cast aspersions on each other's intellect and class loyalty.

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turgid turgid \TUR-jid\, adjective:

1. Swollen, bloated, puffed up; as, "a turgid limb."
2. Swelling in style or language; bombastic, pompous; as, "a turgid style of speaking."

>> The famous Faulkner style was more than many could put up with. Its marathon sentences, its peculiar words used peculiarly, its turgid incoherence and its thick viscosity repelled.
>> Brown's novels are filled with the rigged episodes of melodrama and the turgid prose that passed for elegance among the literary circles in America before Irving and Hawthorne arrived on the scene.
>> Many young Libyans prefer to get their news from the Internet rather than the turgid evening news programs filled with slogans and cliches.
>> The arm being bound, and the veins made turgid, and the valves prominent, as before, apply the thumb or finger over a vein in the situation of one of the valves in such a way as to compress it, and prevent any blood from passing upwards from the hand.

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