Thursday, September 9, 2010

Wordnik: Apposite


Occurrences of the word "apposite" per million words

Found this on an amazing site called WORDNIK ... while trying to find out the true pronunciation of 'apposite' (a friend said she's always pronounced it not like 'opposite' - my way - but with 'sight' at the end. Anyway, I fell upon 'wordnik' and found it hard to get away.)
 apposite
    from the American Heritage Dictionary 

Pronunciations

/(ăpˈə-zĭt)/
by American Heritage Dictionary
    –adjective 
  1. Strikingly appropriate and relevant. See Synonyms at relevant.

Century Dictionary (3 definitions)

  1. Placed near to; specifically, in botany, lying side by side, in contact, or partly united.
  2. Suitable; fit; appropriate; applicable; well adapted: followed by to: as, this argument is very apposite to the case; “ready and apposite answers,” Bacon, Hen. VII., p. 120.
  3. Apt; ready in speech or answer: said of persons.
Latin appositus, past participle of appōnereto put near : ad-ad- + pōnere,to put; see apo- in Indo-European roots.

I guess there are a lot of word-related sites out there, not least the various online dictionaries. But there's something kind of fun about Wordnik - it has the joys of:  Zeitgeist · Word of the day · Random word  amongst other things. And I love that little graph. 

1 comment:

Catherine said...

I thought it was a seismograph for a moment or two :)