This week’s theme
Eponyms

This week’s words
Gallio
Babbittry
chauvinist
Dantean

---

A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(DAN-tee-uhn, dan-TEE-uhn)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Relating to Dante or his writings.
2. Having a hellish quality.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), author of Divine Comedy (1321), an epic poem depicting hell, purgatory, and paradise. Earliest documented use: 1785.

NOTES:

Dante took his readers on the original guided tour of hell, long before reality television. His Inferno is so vivid you can almost smell the sulfur (and the despair). And it has no fewer than nine circles. Among others, Dante fills the circles of hell with corrupt politicians, greedy clergy, and feuding nobles. If only his hell were real.

USAGE:

“I change into a new T-shirt (every night this week will feature Dantean levels of humidity, and by Sunday my tent will house a moraine of deeply fragrant laundry).”
Barrett Swanson; Sobriety and Transcendence at Bonnaroo; Harper’s Magazine (New York); Feb 2025.

“The book is, instead, a sober Inferno, a hellish manual of cautionary tales, with the increasingly frustrated White as a Dantean guide into the hot depths.”
Vinson Cunningham; Up from Urkel; The New Yorker; Dec 23, 2024.

See more usage examples of Dantean in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: