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Jul 3, 2001
This week's theme
Words ending in eric

This week's words
generic
choleric
congeneric
neoteric
suberic

Four temperaments
Four temperaments
Woodcut from Physiognomische Fragmente by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1775

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choleric

PRONUNCIATION:
(KAHL-uhr-ik)

MEANING:
adjective: Easily irritated or angered: hot-tempered.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin cholericus, from Greek cholerikos, from chole (bile). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ghel- (to shine) that is also the source of words such as yellow, gold, glimmer, gloaming, glimpse, glass, arsenic, and cholera.

USAGE:
"Continually throwing off cuttings from its mown prose, the novel delights in word-play. Umeed is, at times, an angry photographer, `a choleric snappeur,' who resents playing second fiddle to the brilliant spectacle, and final demise, of Ormus and Vina: `second-fiddling while Rome burns'."
James Wood, Books: Review: The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian (London, UK), Apr 3, 1999.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

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