A.Word.A.Day --subsume

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Mar 26, 2012

This week's theme
Verbs

This week's words
subsume
discomfit
begrudge
avulse
machinate

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Take it out and the sentence comes crashing down like someone whose soul just left the body. What kind of words are these? They are words that infuse life in conversation, words that perform the job, words that make the world go round, words that do. They are verbs. Five of them will make their appearance in AWAD this week.

subsume

PRONUNCIATION:

(suhb-SOOM, -SYOOM)

MEANING:

verb tr.: To include or incorporate under a more comprehensive category.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin subsumere, from sub- (under) + sumere (to take). Ultimately from the Indo-European root em- (to take or distribute), which is also the source of example, sample, assume, consume, prompt, ransom, vintage, and redeem. Earliest documented use: 1535.

USAGE:

"David Cameron's dream is an authentically British dream -- of a multiethnic United Kingdom, close to but not subsumed by Europe, allied with but not subservient to the United States."
Niall Ferguson; The British Prime Minister Is Coming to America; Newsweek (New York); Mar 12, 2012.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy -- sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. -Thomas Edison, inventor (1847-1931)

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