ponderous

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 5, 2010 is: ponderous • \PAHN-duh-rus\  • adjective 1 : of very great weight 2 : unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size 3 : oppressively or unpleasantly dull : lifeless Examples: "Electronic texts can be updated at the speed of a download rather than waiting for the next edition of a ponderous textbook." (St. Petersburg Times [Florida], June 6, 2010) Did you know? "Ponderous" is ultimately from the Latin word for "weight," namely, "pondus" (which also gave us "ponder" and "preponderance" and is related to "pound"). We adopted "ponderous" with the literal sense "heavy" from Anglo-French "ponderus" in the 15th century, and early on we appended a figurative sense of "weighty," that is, "serious" or "important." But we stopped using the "serious" sense of "ponderous" around 200 years ago -- perhaps because in the meantime we'd imposed on it a different figurative sense of "dull and lifeless," which we still use today. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.