zephyrean

zephyrean \zef-uh-REE-uhn\, adjective:

of, pertaining to, or like a zephyr; full of or containing light breezes.

Now, walking toward them, a gauzy, lavender shawl fluttering in her wake and her long, tight, burgundy curls flying every which way, she exuded zephyrean lightness.

-- Hyatt Bass, The Embers

Oh and her name; her name was softer than a rose petal at dawn, more yielding than the last rays of a dying sun, a zephyrean music that invoked heaven's envy.

-- Massud Alemi, Interruptions

Zephyrean first appeared in print in the 1830s, from the Greek word zéphyros referring to the west wind.

zakuska

zakuska \zuh-KOOS-kuh\, noun:

an hors d'oeuvre.

"Do you have anything for zakuska, Tractvanna?" Oleg took stock of the table: boiled potatoes, bread, canned peas and sardines, a clove of garlic.

-- Marina Sonkina, "Tractorina's Travels," Lucia's Eyes and Other Stories

I drink a shot, take a bite of marinated mushrooms in sour cream. Humankind has yet to invent any betterzakuska. Even Nanny's half-sour pickles can't hold a candle to this.

-- Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Oprichnik

This Russian word for a snack, zakuska, entered the lexicon in the mid 1880s as a derivative of kusát meaning "to bite."

yare

yare \yair\, adjective:

1. quick; agile; lively.
2. (of a ship) quick to the helm; easily handled or maneuvered.
3. Archaic. a. ready; prepared. b. nimble; quick.

I reckon I was hopin' it would take us to the landin'. She looks yare to me.

-- Jo Goodman, Crystal Passion

Faith, then, up foot! be yare, or, by the mass, I may forget that I am in some sort your captain and in some your debtor! Go!

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow

Yare was used in Middle English before the year 900, but its Old English progenitor gearu meant "ready" or "prepared."

xeric

xeric \ZEER-ik\, adjective:

of, pertaining to, or adapted to a dry environment.

Tegene pointed out the subtle contouring that gradually ascended toward xeric slopes, where Lynden's army planted many surprises amidst the dry vegetation.

-- Robert Luis Rabello, The Long Journey

The range of plants selected tolerate this xeric, or very dry, regimen quite well.

-- Steven L. Cantor, Green Roofs in Sustainable Landscape Design

Xeric, a relatively young word, was coined by ecologists W.S. Cooper and A.O. Weese in 1926 to replace the word xerophytic for a lack of moisture in both plants and animals.

whipsaw

whipsaw \HWIP-saw\, verb:

1. to subject to two opposing forces at the same time: The real-estate market has been whipsawed by high interest rates and unemployment.
2. to cut with a whipsaw.
3. to win two bets from (a person) at one turn or play, as at faro.
4. (of a trailer, railroad car, etc.) to swing suddenly to the right or left, as in rounding a sharp curve at high speed.

noun:
1. a saw for two persons, as a pitsaw, used to divide timbers lengthwise.

The hour was past midnight; rumor and slander continued to whipsaw the throng.

-- Steven Pressfield, Last of the Amazons

Carter's human rights policies were thus whipsawed between moral and strategic considerations, as well as between different parts of the bureaucracy.

-- Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions

They fill the farmer full of hot air and get him to raise a big crop for them to whipsaw on the market, to trim the suckers with.

-- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Whipsaw entered into wide usage in the 1530s from a portmanteau combination of "whip" and "saw." "Whip" is derived from the Proto Germanic wippen meaning "to flap violently." "Saw" is derived from the Old English sagureferring to a cutting tool.

varia

varia \VAIR-ee-uh\, noun:

miscellaneous items, especially a miscellany of literary works.

This volume of Children's Literature differs from others in that its articles, varia, and many of its reviews were selected to illustrate a single theme...

-- Edited by Francelia Butler, Children's Literature, Vol. 15

There go the women, off to dig up tubers or gather other varia, the chores getting done by groups that seemed to agglutinate differently each time you watched.

-- Norman Rush, Mating

Varia is the neuter or non-gendered plural of varius, a word transcribed directly from the Latin meaning "varied, different" and originally "spotted."

umber

umber \UHM-ber\, noun:

1. North England Dialect. shade; shadow.
2. an earth consisting chiefly of a hydrated oxide of iron and some oxide of manganese, used in its natural state as a brown pigment (raw umber) or, after heating, as a reddish-brown pigment (burnt umber).
3. the color of such a pigment; dark dusky brown or dark reddish brown.
4. Ichthyology. the European grayling, Thymallus thymallus.

adjective:
1. of the color umber.

verb:
1. to color with or as if with umber.

"Sir," said Gouvernail, "see ye him not? I weened that ye had seen him, for yonder he hoveth under theumber of his ships, on horseback with his spear in his hand and his shield upon his shoulder."

-- Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d'Arthur

Yet despite the scorn that often issued from Lawrence's mouth, it was in the nature of that particular shade of umber that his eyes could express a limited set of emotions: tenderness, gratitude, injury, and need.

-- Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

Beside the sense of "shade," umber more commonly describes a brown earthy pigment popular in the 1560s. The word has come full circle because the Latin root umbra refers to a "shadow" or "shade."

tensile

tensile \TEN-suhl\, adjective:

1. capable of being stretched or drawn out; ductile.
2. of or pertaining to tension: tensile strain.

Claire's tensile features pull themselves tight with glee.

-- Zadie Smith, On Beauty

One way of increasing the tensile strength in a wooden bow at any time of the year was to apply a sinew backing.

-- Louis Bird, Jennifer S. H. Brown, Anne Lindsay, Telling Our Stories

This late Renaissance word tensile was derived in 1626 from the Latin verb tendere meaning "to stretch."

satrap

satrap \SEY-trap\, noun:

1. a subordinate ruler, often a despotic one.
2. a governor of a province under the ancient Persian monarchy.

I govern this land for my brother, and as his satrap it is my duty to know much of the neighboring lands.

-- Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Sidon

It was common knowledge: this baby's father was some sort of latter-day satrap, a king of the East who had fetched himself a blond, horse-toothed bride from a women's college in New Jersey.

-- Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

A Medieval word, satrap originated in the Old Persian from the literary prefix kshathrapavan-, meaning "guardian of the realm."

recant

recant \ri-KANT\, verb:

1. to withdraw or disavow (a statement, opinion, etc.), especially formally; retract.
2. to withdraw or disavow a statement, opinion, etc., especially formally.

In the circumstances, Mr Badby, I feel that I can offer you a pension in return for your decision to recant.
-- Robert Nye, Falstaff

It was the only part of it they really wanted me to recant, as a sign that I was getting well again.
-- Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

This Reformation era word entered the lexicon in the 1530s from the Latin cantāre meaning "to sing." Thus recant literally translates as "to sing again" or "to sing back."

quittance

quittance \KWIT-ns\, noun:

1. recompense or requital.
2. discharge from a debt or obligation.
3. a document certifying discharge from debt or obligation, as a receipt.

Very good; here is the money. Now make me out a quittance, signed.

-- Edward Gilliat, John Standish, Or, The Harrowing of London

And now she said to Leta, "Give me your quittance price." "Mother," said Leta, "it is all I have."

-- Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann

Quittance is derived from the Old French quit meaning "free, clear." The root did not take on its negative connotation, "to give up," until the 1600s.

paraph

paraph \PAR-uhf\, noun:

a flourish made after a signature, as in a document, originally as a precaution against forgery.

The manuscript's most tantalizing feature is a scribal paraph with the initials IB at the end of Certain sonnets...
-- H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts

His worried expression, however, was not just a mask for the moment. Of late, it had become his most distinctive feature, his peculiar paraph.
-- Ken Anderson, The Statue Of Pan

The paraph is only a schematic and marginal countersignature, a fragment of signature; indeed, who can claim to decipher a whole signature?
-- Jacques Derrida, Mémoires

Though early incarnations of paraph appear in Italian, Middle French, and Middle English, its earliest origins are Greek with para- meaning "beside" and the final -ph resulting from graphos, referring to text.

obnubilate

obnubilate\ob-NOO-buh-leyt\, verb:

to cloud over; becloud; obscure.

...their trunks were black and knobbly, whilst their branches buckled over as a roof to meet a brick plane andobnubilate a view of the stars.

-- Colin Cornelius, Monkeys Can't Swim

It is the pity of the world, Dr Maturin, to see a man of your parts obnubilate his mind with the juice of the poppy.

-- Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command

Obnubilate, a late 16th century word, is a verbal derivative of the Latin nūbilus meaning "cloudy," though its closer ancestor, obnūbilāre means "to darken."

uque

uque \nook\, noun:

the back of the neck.

She wore a figured lawn, cut a little low in the back, that exposed a round, soft nuque with a few little clinging circlets of soft, brown hair.

-- Kate Chopin, "A Night in Acadie," The Complete Works of Kate Chopin

If he had been a Frenchman he would have seized her in his arms and told her passionately that he adored her; he would have pressed his lips on her nuque.

-- William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Nuque originated in the late 1500s from the French nucha for "nape," though its earliest origin is Arabic nukhāreferring to "spinal marrow."

mainour

mainour \MEY-ner\, noun:

a stolen article found on the person of or near the thief: to be taken with the mainour.

Caught the thief, with the mainour, hey?

-- Maria Edgeworth, The Parent's Assistant

...if I be taken in the mainour, if the theft be found about me, I shall be either killed, or carted with a paper crown set upon my head, having my fault written in great text-letters.

-- Fernando de Rojas, The Celestina

Mainour, a Medieval word, entered Middle English from the Old French manoeuvre meaning "hand labor."

Jacobin

Jacobin \JAK-uh-bin\, noun:

1. an extreme radical, especially in politics.
2. (in the French Revolution) a member of a radical society or club of revolutionaries that promoted the Reign of Terror and other extreme measures, active chiefly from 1789 to 1794: so called from the Dominican convent in Paris, where they originally met.
3. a Dominican friar.
4. (lowercase) one of a fancy breed of domestic pigeons having neck feathers that hang over the head like a hood.

Yet the politics of the Romantic-era novel during these decades finally cannot be reduced to the formula ofJacobin vs. anti-Jacobin, or radical vs. conservative.

-- Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Charlotte Sussman, Recognizing the Romantic Novel

We formerly gave the Editor of The Times a definition of a true Jacobin, as one "who had seen the evening star set over a poor man's cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness."

-- Diane Ravitch, The English Reader

This French word has a radical history worthy of its definition. The Jacobins are an order of Dominican friars that have practiced in Paris since the 1300s. During the French Revolution, Parisian radicals quartered themselves in the Jacobin convent of Saint Jacques in 1789, and now Jacobin can refer to revolutionaries or extremists of any kind.

kinchin

kinchin \kin-chin\, noun:

a child.

He's naught but a kinchin, no bigger than a sparrow.

-- Joan Aiken, The Whispering Mountain

Now I come to think of it, Kinchin is English too. In Oliver Twist the boys who work for Fagin are taught to bekinchins and prig people's wipes.

-- Angela Thirkell, Caroline Alice Lejeune, Three Score and Ten

Derived from the German kindchen, kinchin is a diminutive form of kind meaning "child." Kindchen entered the lexicon in the last decade of the 1600s.

hent

hent \hent\, verb:

to seize.

Then he hent in hand two stones and went round about the city…
-- Lady Isabel Burton, Justin Huntly McCarthy, Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights

So they hent him by the hand and thrust him out; and I took the lute and sang over again the songs of my own composing which the damsel had sung.
-- Emile Van Vliet, The Thousand Nights and A Night

Hent, an ancient word, entered Old English before the year 1000 as a relative of the verbs hentan "to pursue" and huntian "to hunt."

irrefrangible

irrefrangible \ir-i-FRAN-juh-buhl\, adjective:

1. not to be broken or violated; inviolable: an irrefrangible rule of etiquette.
2. incapable of being refracted.

In any other nation a typical official like Eliav would find himself allied against the priests who insisted upon such irrefrangible law, and even he had begun to echo the warning voiced by liana Hacohen: "this Mickey Mouse crap."
-- James A. Michener, The Source

But no, Kipling never forgets that Kim is an irrefrangible part of British India: the Great Game does go on, with Kim a part of it, no matter how many parables the lama fashions.
-- Rudyard Kipling, Edward W. Said, "Introduction," Kim

This Baroque era word irrefrangible derives from a negation of the Latin root frangere meaning "to break," also the root of the word "fraction."

gastronomy

gastronomy \ga-STRON-uh-mee\, noun:

1. the art or science of good eating.
2. a style of cooking or eating.

Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he's fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy?
-- Lev Grossman, The Magician King

"Tell me, dear lady," she would shriek down the table at me with a comradely twinkle, "tell me . . . explain to all of us, how one can dare to call herself a writer on gastronomy in the United States, where, from everything we hear, gastronomy does not yet exist?"
-- M.F.K. Fisher, Two Towns in Provence

The name of this delicious discipline entered the lexicon in the early 1800s. Gastronomy combines the prefix gastro- from the Greek gastēr meaning "stomach" and the suffix -nomy indicating a science or field of study.

feuilleton

feuilleton \FOI-i-tn\, noun:

1. a part of a European newspaper devoted to light literature, fiction, criticism, etc.
2. an item printed in the feuilleton.

The editor is impressed by my work and says he will consider my feuilleton, if I submit it this afternoon.
-- Selden Edwards, The Little Book

The novel in numbers is known with us, but the daily feuilleton has not yet been tried by our newspapers, the proprietors of some of which would, perhaps, do well to consider the matter.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray, Jerome Paturot

Feuilleton originally referred to the light fiction or serial articles that commonl

epexegesis

epexegesis \ep-ek-si-JEE-sis\, noun:

1. the addition of a word or words to explain a preceding word or sentence.
2. the word or words so added.

But you did establish personal contact? In epexegesis or on a point of order?
-- James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

One of the most striking peculiarities of colloquial speech in Dutch, and of natural free talk in general, is what is called epexegesis.
-- Jan Gonda, Selected Studies

Epexegesis, a late Renaissance word, is derived from the Greek epexḗgēsis meaning explanation.

dyslogistic

dyslogistic \dis-luh-JIS-tik\, adjective:

conveying disapproval or censure; not complimentary or eulogistic.

She had forgotten for the moment the Captain's invidious and dyslogistic employment of the Greek alphabet.
-- Michael Innes, Appleby's Answer

One answer lies in a less well-known but equally important countertradition, the dyslogistic school of memoir written by former officials who present themselves as disillusioned innocents.
-- Jacob Heilbrunn, "Not My Fault," The New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 22, 2008

Dyslogistic grew to prominence in the early 1800s, by applying the negative prefix dys- to a (eu)logistic expression of praise in speech or writing.

counterfactual

counterfactual \koun-ter-FAK-choo-uhl\, noun:

a conditional statement the first clause of which expresses something contrary to fact, as "If I had known."

The ruse is so obvious, a counterfactual posing as a home truth.
-- Matt Feeney, "Michael Chabon's Oakland," The New Yorker, September 26, 2012

Nevertheless, a counterfactual conditional differs from a piece of fiction only insofar as in the first case the addressee is requested to cooperate more actively in the realization of the text he receives...
-- Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader

This word was born in the late 1940s from a portmanteau of two complete words. Counterfactual imagines a reality that is counter to the factual, or lived, experience.

boustrophedon

boustrophedon \boo-struh-FEED-n\, noun:

an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right.

This, they call the boustrophedon form because it mimics the back-and-forth pacing of an ox tied to a tether.
-- Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

Elsa suddenly recalls a word from the recesses of her memory: boustrophedon, scripts written in alternating directions.
-- Jennifer Vanderbes, Easter Island

This ancient form of writing is named for an ancient form of farming and literally translates as "to turn like an ox while plowing." Derived from the Greek boûs for "ox," and strophē meaning "to turn," boustrophedon describes a snake-like motion in which a line of text doubles back on itself as it descends a page.

atavistic

atavistic \at-uh-VIS-tik\, adjective:

of, pertaining to, or characterized by atavism; reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type.

Buck exhibits atavistic characteristics when his instincts and memories of an impossibly distant past "call" him and reassert themselves into his behavior.
-- Jack London, The Call of the Wild

...so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Derived from the Latin atavus meaning "ancestor," atavistic gained popularity in the 1870s.

jackanapes

jackanapes \JAK-uh-neyps\, noun:

1. An impertinent, presumptuous person, especially a young man; whippersnapper.
2. An impudent, mischievous child.
3. Archaic. An ape or monkey.

I blame those jackanapes on the council…
-- George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire

The long-established practitioners, Mr Wrench and Mr Toller, were just now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode's purpose.
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Jackanapes is a circuitous eponym. In the 1300s, it literally meant "jack of the apes" and was the nickname of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, whose badge was an ape's clog and chain. The word acquired the sense of "mischievous boy" two hundred years later.