

Dec 25, 2015 This week’s theme

Yours to discover



This week’s words

quoz

vidimus

pinchbeck

jayhawker

expergefacient



Art: Randolph Caldecott

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Next week’s theme

First words Yours to discover A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg



expergefacient PRONUNCIATION: (eks-puhr-juh-FAY-shuhnt)

MEANING: adjective: Awakening or arousing.

noun: A drug or other agent that awakens or arouses.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin expergefacere (to awaken), from expergisci (to become awake) + facere (to make or do). Earliest documented use: 1821.

USAGE: “These symptoms of nervous excitement, brought on by an overdose of the expergefacient, soon passed off, and next day he was himself again.”

The London Lancet; 1864.

THEME: So how were this week’s words selected? These five words had all the letters of the English alphabet, except the letter L. Joyeux Noel! Now, a pangram is a sentence that uses all letters of the alphabet. The most well-known is “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog” which makes use of 33 letters. People have come up with shorter pangrams too. Let’s call it a noelgram -- a sentence that uses all letters of the alphabet, except the letter L. What noelgrams can you come up with?

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: Why are so many people shy, lonely, shut up within themselves, unequal to their tasks, unable to be happy? Because they are inhabited by fear, like the man in the Parable of the Talents, erecting walls around themselves instead of building bridges into the lives of others; shutting out life. -Joseph Fort Newton, minister and attorney (1876-1950)





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