This week’s theme
Words with multiple meanings

This week’s words
churl
dickey
dingbat
decollate
lave

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(for 1: dee-KAH-layt, for 2: DEK-uh-layt)

MEANING:

verb tr.:
1. To behead.
2. To separate sheets of paper, from a multiple-copy printout, for example.

ETYMOLOGY:

For 1: From Latin decollare, from de- (from) + collum (neck). Earliest documented use: 1599.
For 2: From de- (from) + collate (to gather, merge, etc.), from conferre (to bring together). Earliest documented use: 1967.

NOTES:

Sometimes the word decollate is used as an alternate spelling for the decollete (which is a short for decolletage: a low neckline on a woman’s dress). If your name is Chasity and you’re writing a romance novel (The Other Wife), any spelling is fine. But when you need to refer to a low neckline in a formal context -- an office memo, a research paper, a court brief, a patent application, etc. -- it’s best to go with decollete.

USAGE:

“But supple loops of the Grene’s tail whipped around the neck of the silver behemoth as if to decollate.”
R. Dennis Baird; Talon of Light; AuthorHouse; 2004.

“These printouts were then manually decollated, bursted, sorted, folded, and inserted into envelopes.”
Subashini Selvaratnam; Boosting Operational Efficiency; New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia); Sep 26, 2005.

“The decollate was quite revealing but not unseemly. I didn’t do it for him. Even telling herself that, it rang false.”
Chasity Bowlin; The Other Wife; Amazon; 2021.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: