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Feb 27, 2024
This week’s theme
Adjectives

This week’s words
alible
fulgurant
anfractuous
heliotropic
antelucan

fulgurant
Illustration: Anu Garg + AI

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A.Word.A.Day
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fulgurant

PRONUNCIATION:
(FUHL/FULL-guh-ruhnt)

MEANING:
adjective:
1. Flashing like lightning.
2. Brilliant.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin fulgurate (to flash), from fulgor (brightness), from fulgere (to shine). Ultimately from the Indo-European root bhel- (to shine or burn), which also gave us blaze, blank, blond, bleach, blanket, flame, refulgent , fulminate, and effulgent. Earliest documented use: 1611.

USAGE:
“The darkened kitchen, fulgurant with lightning beyond a rain-streaked window.”
Dale Bailey; Cockroach; Fantasy & Science Fiction (Hoboken, New Jersey); Dec 1998.

“It was a beautiful spring day in Smyrna, Georgia, full of blooming Bradford pears and dogwood and other trees and shrubs that I couldn’t name, blasting with the fulgurant petals of May.”
Doug Crandell; Back Story; Smithsonian (Washington, DC); May 2004.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (27 Feb 1902-1968)

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