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Mar 15, 2021
This week’s themePlaces that have given us multiple toponyms This week’s words coventry Roman matron Canterbury tale Trojan horse Kentish cousins 
Photo: Ken Timbers Previous week’s theme Euryvocalic words 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargHaving a word coined after yourself -- that’s quite an achievement -- doesn’t happen all that often. Examples: Socratic irony and Socratic method. You’re more likely to win a Nobel prize than to have a word, known as an eponym (from Greek ep-: after + -onym: name), coined after you. Let’s just call such people overachievers. Then there are words coined after places, known as toponyms (from Greek topos: place). Again, it’s rare to have a word coined after a place name, but there are some places -- overachievers of sorts -- that have given us multiple words. This week, we’ll visit five places and look at words coined after them. In a couple of weeks, we’ll revisit them and look at another word that came from there. Coventry
PRONUNCIATION:
(KUV-uhn-tree)
MEANING:
noun: A state of ostracism.
ETYMOLOGY:
After Coventry, a city in central England. It’s unclear how Coventry
developed this sense. One conjecture is that Royalist prisoners were
sent there during the English Civil War. Earliest documented use: 1691.
Also see stellenbosch.
USAGE:
“When I was about twelve, all the girls at school stopped talking to
me ... I arrived at school and gradually realized that I had been sent
to Coventry. It made me miserable, so upset.” Rowan Coleman; The Day We Met; Ballantine; 2015. See more usage examples of Coventry in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters
of consciousness, they are altering your world. -Ben Okri, poet and
novelist (b. 15 Mar 1959)
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