compendious
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What is the word of the day and how is it introduced?
It's the word of the day podcast for September twenty third. Today's word is compendious, spelled C O M P E N D I O U S.
How is “compendious” defined and what does it mean in everyday usage?
Compendious is an adjective. A compendious book, research paper, or article is one that provides most or all of the information one may want or require. Similarly, a person might be said to have compendious knowledge of a subject. If they have a full and wide ranging, that is comprehensive grasp of it. Compendius can also describe something that is both comprehensive and concise, as in a compendious summary. Here's the word used in a sentence from the Boston Globe.
What real‑world example illustrates a compendious field note?
For much of a career that spanned decades, he pursued the Osigns or songbirds of the Neotropics to their habitats in the southern hemisphere, sketching, making compendious field notes, and amassing a vast file of images that he used as a reference tool when painting the plates for definitive books. When Noah Webster titled his first dictionary published in eighteen oh six a compendious dictionary of the English language, he used the word compendious to mean short, brief, concise summary, as he defined it on the book's fifty eighth page. This may come as a surprise given that compendious is now most often used to mean comprehensive, and is applied to books or published Papers that are quite lengthy.
How did Noah Webster’s original meaning of “compendious” evolve over time?
But Webster's Compendious Dictionary was no more than a preparation for his two-volume An American Dictionary of the English language from 1828, and Compendious traces back to the Latin adjective compendiosus, meaning both comprehensive and succinct. Webster's title signaled that his debut word compendium would be useful if not exhaustive. Today, however, Compendious asserts comprehensiveness typically without brevity. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit MarionWebster dot com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the word of the day and how is it introduced?
0:06–0:19
2
How is “compendious” defined and what does it mean in everyday usage?
0:19–0:52
3
What real‑world example illustrates a compendious field note?
0:52–1:41
4
How did Noah Webster’s original meaning of “compendious” evolve over time?
1:41–2:24