This week’s interesting word is porraceous. I will buy an imaginary drink for anyone who knows what it means without looking it up – and a bonus imaginary packet of crisps if you have used it in everyday conversation.

Porraceous means ‘resembling a leek’. It is typically used to mean that something is leek-green in colour. (In many cases the something is vomit.)

It is early 17th century in origin, and stems from the Latin word porrāceus (itself from porrum meaning ‘leek’ and āceus meaning ‘of the nature of’).

“Martians, according to general sci-fi ethnobotany, are always small, hydrocephalic, intelligent, and seem a sort of porraceous green.”

– Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996

Isn’t the English language brilliant?

Sources:

• Oxford Dictionaries Online
• Oxford English Dictionary Online

This week’s interesting word is anfractuous. It is rare to see it in use, but I think it has a good sound and is fairly evocative.

Anfractuous means winding, sinuous, circuitous or spiral. It can also mean rugged or craggy and fractious or irritable.

Its origin is thought to be late 16th century, from the Latin word anfractus which means ‘a bending’. The meaning of rugged or craggy stems from the French word anfractueux.

“Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.”

– T. S. Eliot, Ara vos prec, 1920

Sources:

• The Oxford English Dictionary Online
• Oxford Dictionaries Online

This week’s interesting word is probably familiar to film fans, but you can find a McGuffin in all sorts of narrative works.

A McGuffin (or MacGuffin) is an object, device or event that has only one true purpose: to set the plot in motion. The audience is usually initially told that the object or thing is extremely important, but the McGuffin does not often have any real importance as the plot develops. The McGuffin is the soon-to-be-stolen diamond or the missing USB drive that serves to start and drive the story.

The precise definition of a McGuffin is widely debated, but the origin is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock. The OED gives the first recorded usage as in 1939:

“In regard to the tune, we have a name in the studio, and we call it the ‘MacGuffin’. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. We just try to be a little more original.”

– Alfred Hitchcock, Lecture at Columbia University

Hitchcock suggests he took the surname MacGuffin from a humorous story involving a McGuffin-type incident. The choice of name is not thought to be related to the word guffin, meaning ‘a stupid or clumsy person’.

Source:

• The Oxford English Dictionary Online

Temerarious is a word that is only really at home in literary texts. It means ‘reckless’, ‘rash’ or ‘unreasonably adventurous’.

If you try to give a tiger a cuddle, you are being temerarious.

You may find in some historical texts that temerarious has been used to mean ‘haphazard’ or ‘happening at random’, but this usage is now obsolete.

The OED gives the first recorded usage as in 1532. But I think this is a good example of temerarious used well:

“The King was one of the first that entred [the breach], choosing rather to be thought temerarious then timorous.”

– John Speed, The history of Great Britaine under the conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. 1611

The word comes from the Latin temerarius , where temere means ‘rashly’. (The word temerity, meaning ‘excessive confidence’ or ‘audacity’, also has its roots in temere.) The suffix -ous denotes ‘full of’ or ‘characterised by’. The noun is temerariousness.

Source:

• The Oxford English Dictionary Online

The weather where I live has been lovely this week. It has inspired me to choose noonlight as this week’s interesting word.

Words such as daylight, twilight and moonlight are common, but noonlight is fairly rare.

Noonlight is the light of the sun at noon. It is usually the brightest and clearest light of the day.

Noonlight’s origins are simple (‘noon’ plus ‘light’). The OED gives its first use as in 1598, but this usage resonated when I looked out of my window today:

“Through the blue dazzling distance of noon-light“

– James Montgomery, Bolehill Trees in The West Indies, and other poems. 1810

Source:

• The Oxford English Dictionary Online