Word of the Day

Pulchritudinous, “physically beautiful,” first occurs in 1877 in Puck, the first successful American humor magazine, and all the occurrences of pulchritudinous are facetious or humorous. Pulchritudinous is formed from the Latin noun pulchritūdō (inflectional stem pulchritūdin-) “beauty” and the adjective suffix -ous.

Sine die in English means “without a day (set for resuming business).” It is a Latin phrase composed of the preposition sine “without” (sine governs the ablative case) and diē, the ablative singular of the noun diēs “day.” Sine diē is not a technical term in Roman law, political procedure, or religion; it is a Latin phrase used nearly exclusively in modern British and American legislative, court, and corporate procedures. Sine die entered English in the 17th century.

Boondoggle, originally a term from the Boy Scouts meaning “a product of simple manual skill, such as a plaited cord for the neck or a knife sheath, typically made by a Boy Scout,” was supposedly coined in the mid-1920s by Robert H. Link, of Rochester, New York, as a nickname for his infant son. In the summer of 1929, Link, a Scoutmaster, attended the World Boy Scouts Jamboree in Birkenhead, England, not far from Liverpool. Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), attended the Jamboree, at which the Scouts from the U.S. presented him with a boondoggle, now meaning “a plaited leather cord or lanyard worn around the neck” (the presentation was reported in the American and British press). By the mid-1930s boondoggle had acquired the sense “a kind of make-work consisting of small items of leather or crafted by the jobless during the Great Depression.” This last sense is the source of the usual modern sense of boondoggle, “a wasteful and worthless project undertaken for political, corporate, or personal gain,” and it is especially used of government projects funded by taxpayers.

Ubiety (also spelled ubeity and formerly ubity) is an altogether strange word whose literal meaning is “whereness”; its current meaning is “the property of having a definite location at a given time; the state of existing and being localized in space,” in other words, “location.” Ubiety comes from New Latin ubietās (inflectional stem ubietāt-) “location, position,” formed from Latin ubi, the relative and interrogative adverb meaning “where, where?” and the noun suffix -etās, a variant of -itās used after i. Alexander Ross, a prolific 17th-century Scottish writer and chaplain to King Charles I, was the first writer in English to use ubiety. Writing on the qualities of souls, Ross says, “Neither are the souls nowhere, nor are they everywhere; not nowhere, for ubiety is so necessary to created entities.” Ubiety entered English in the first half of the 17th century.

Oligopoly, “a condition of the market in which there are few sellers, which grants sellers great influence over prices,” is modeled on the familiar noun monopoly (via Latin monopōlium “sole right to sell a commodity,” from Greek monopṓlion “right of monopoly, exclusive sale”). Oligopoly is a compound of the combining form oligo- “few, a few, little” (most often seen in oligarchy “government by only a few”) from Greek olígos, of uncertain etymology. The element -poly, common to monopoly and oligopoly, is a derivative of the Greek verb pōleîn “to offer for sale, sell.” Oligopoly entered English towards the end of the 19th century.