Today's Word

Yesterday's Word

Archives

FAQ

Discuss
Email this
Feedback
RSS/XML
Permalink

A.Word.A.Day--cenotaph

This week's words are created using combining forms. What are combining forms? You can think of them as the Legos of language.

As the name indicates, a combining form is a linguistic atom that occurs only in combination with some other form. This other form could be a word, another combining form, or an affix (a prefix or suffix). Unlike a combining form, an affix can't attach to another affix to form a standalone word by itself.

When coining a new word, these ready-made building blocks of the language come in handy. Let's say we need a new insult word, a fancy word to describe someone as brainless. We could start with ceno- (empty), add -cephalic (relating to the head) to it, and our new word is ready: cenocephalic.

This week we'll see words made using these combining forms: ceno- (empty), endo- (within), seti- (bristle), nocti- (night), and geo- (earth). Happy word crafting!

cenotaph (SEN-uh-taf) noun

A tomb or a monument in honor of a person (or a group) whose remains are elsewhere.

[Via French and Latin, from Greek kenotaphion, from kenos (empty) + taphos (tomb).]

Check out the pictures of cenotaphs around the world.

See more usage examples of cenotaph in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"Then I joined the throngs at the cenotaph inscribed NEVER AGAIN, at an eternal flame above a reflecting pool, and at the crane-festooned statue of Sadako Sasaki, a bomb victim who died at the age of twelve while attempting to fold a thousand paper cranes in the hope this would prolong her life." Samuel Day Jr.; Two Hiroshimas; The Progressive (Madison, Wisconsin); Aug 1994.

X-Bonus