Pervicacious \puhr-vih-KAY-shuhs\, adjective:Refusing to change one’s ideas, behavior, etc.; stubborn; obstinate. In fact, I’m a word nerd. I get a kick out of tossing a few odd ones intomy column, just to see if the pervicacious editors will weed them out.— Michael Hawley, “Things That Matter: Waiting for Linguistic Viagra”, Technology Review, June, 2001 One […]

Verisimilitude \ver-uh-suh-MIL-uh-tood; -tyood\, noun:1. The appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true.2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real. In an attempt to create verisimilitude, in addition to the usual vulgarities, the dialogue is full of street slang.— Wilborn Hampton, “Sugar Down Billie Hoak’: An Unexpected Spot to Find […]

Arcane \ar-KAYN\, adjective:Understood or known by only a few. Under Indonesia’s arcane system of land tenure, disputes between local residents, and between locals and developers, are commonplace.— “Not Fair.”, TheEconomist, July 26, 1997 While addressing a problem in the arcane field of mathematical logic, he imagined a machine that could mimic human reasoning.— Paul Gray, […]

Surcease \SUR-sees; sur-SEES\, noun:Cessation; stop; end. One of his clearest remembrances from childhood was the feeling that swept over him when, on a Saturday morning, the sun had sequestered itself behind a cascade of clouds and rain, thick, relentless walls of rain, came pounding down with no promise of surcease, black greasy rain that eradicated […]

Insouciant \in-SOO-see-uhnt\, adjective:Marked by lighthearted unconcern or indifference; carefree; nonchalant. The insouciant gingerbread man skips through the pages with glee, until he meets his . . . demise at the end.— Judith Constantinides, “The Gingerbread Man”, School Library Journal, April 2002 They don’t seem to care whether they become stars or not, and their irony […]

confute \kuhn-FYOOT\, transitive verb:To overwhelm by argument; to refute conclusively; to prove or show to be false. Having settled in Rome in 1486, he proposed 900 theses and challenged any scholar to confute them, agreeing to pay his expenses.— David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first […]

Day late, sorry. Twice the work today then 😉 Acquiesce \ak-wee-ES\, intransitive verb:To accept or consent passively or without objection — usually used with ‘in’ or ‘to’. At the same time, sellers might acquiesce to mafia involvement in their business as a way of ensuring payment for goods: if the buyer defaults, the mafioso will […]

Explicate \EK-spluh-kayt\, transitive verb:To explain; to clear of difficulties or obscurity. I can cite a case — my own — of a young person’s being altered politically by a novel, but I cannot explicate the process, let alone explain it in terms of the author’s intention or literary strategies.— Mary McCarthy, “The Lasting Power of […]

requisite \REK-wuh-zit\, adjective: 1. Required by the nature of things or by circumstances; indispensable.2. That which is required or necessary; something indispensable. Those with the requisite talents made drawings and watercolors of the birds, the flowers, the untouched landscapes that unfolded before them.— Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia In this way, 2,156 […]

sui generis \soo-eye-JEN-ur-us; soo-ee-\, adjective:Being the only example of its kind; constituting a class of its own; unique. This man, in fact, was sui generis, a true original.— Ruth Lord, Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur They’re a special case, a category of their own, sui generis.— Eric Kraft, Leaving Small’s Hotel In the degree […]