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lucubration
Episode 4275

lucubration

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day · Merriam-Webster

July 8, 20181m 50s

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Show Notes

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 8, 2018 is:


lucubration \loo-kyuh-BRAY-shun\ noun

: laborious or intensive study; also : the product of such study — usually used in plural


Examples:

The book is a collection of lucubrations on the effect advancements in computer science have on economic policy.

"Surely when we talk about our mental lives we're simply thinking of everything that makes human beings special, different—our thoughts, our language-based lucubration." — Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books, 21 Nov. 2016


Did you know?

Imagine someone studying through the night by the light of a dim candle or lamp. That image demonstrates perfectly the most literal sense of lucubration. Our English word derives from the Latin verb lucubrare, meaning "to work by lamplight." (That Latin root is related to lux, the Latin word for "light.") In its earliest known English uses, lucubration named both nocturnal study itself and a written product thereof. By the 1800s, however, the term had been broadened to refer to any intensive study (day or night), or a composition, especially a weighty one, generated as a result of such study. Nowadays, lucubration is most often used in its plural form and implies pompous or stuffy scholarly writing.

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Topics

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