Sunday, October 5, 2008

Writing - Word of the Day

I found a neat website called DailyWritingTips.com and on there they have a "word of the day" section. If you click that link above, you're brought to the archive area where you can see past words of the day.

There are tons of great words there that you may not know. I'd like you to visit that site (DailyWritingTips.com/), find a word you do not currently know (or know well), and click on it. When you do that, you'll see the word and its definition. Come back here & post the word plus its definition so we can all learn new words.

I'll start!

Word of the Day: Meritocracy
Meritocracy (mĕr’ĭ-tŏk’rə-sē) is a system where the advancement of individuals is based on their performance and ability. American companies, for instance, are said to be more meritocratic than Italian ones, where nepotism (family connections) prevail.

Now you try!

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dystopian [dĭs-tō'pē-ən] (or dystopic) is the adjective form of dystopia, a place in which people live in misery. It derives from the literary invention of Utopia, an imaginary place in which human misery has been eliminated. The terms are common in film criticism.

Tais M

Anonymous said...

Apocalypse with the definite article,the end of the world.Apocalypse writing prophecies of the end of the world couched in symbolic language were a popular genre with jewish and early christian writing between 200b.c.e and c.e.150.

Anonymous said...

delbon johnson

Anonymous said...

Fundamentalism (fŭn’də-mĕn’tl-ĭz’əm) in a religious sense is an effort to return to “fundamentals,” or founding principles. It was first applied in the early 20th century to an American militant conservative Protestant movement that rejected the new science of textual criticism, insisting instead upon a literal interpretation of the Bible. The term is now used to describe anti-modernist elements in any religion.

Crystal Smolter

Anonymous said...

Idiosyncrasy
Idiosyncrasy comes from the Greek: idios “one’s own” and sun-krasis “temperament” or “mixture.” Idiosyncrasy is a peculiar habit or characteristic of an individual or group. It can also refer to mental and physical characteristics.
"This compendium of epithets, pejoratives, blasphemies and obscenities manages to be informal in its style without succumbing to idiosyncrasy or leering. "

Anonymous said...

Plethora. You have a plethora whhen you go beyond what is needed or appropriate. It represents an excess or undesired abundance. B VERNA

Anonymous said...

Agora. Agora was an open marketplace, present in most cities of the ancient Greese. Today the term can be used to express any type of open assembly or congregation. B Verna

Anonymous said...

Zeitgeist is a German term that means "spirit of the time." It is commonly used to illustrate the trends and characteristics of a period or gneration. Google, for instance, release monthly and annual reports with the most popular search queries, and they call those reports Google Zeitgeist.

Lisa Bristol

Anonymous said...

Word of the day: Bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy refers to the administrative system that governs social organizations.Bureaucracy includes laws,regulations departments,and committees.Bureaucracy is often used in a negative sense to denote procedures which seem to reject common sense and human feeling.

Sheila W.

Anonymous said...

Caucasian is a commonly used as an adjective to describe people from racial groups characterized by white skin, especially ones with Europeon origin.

Indira H

Anonymous said...

Word of the Day: Teraflop

The word teraflop combines tera, which is a prefix from the International System of Units used to denote one trilion (1,000,000,000,000), with flop, which is an acronym of Floating Point Operations Per Second.

You can make an analogy with the number of instructions per second that can be handled. Flops are mainly used to measure the performance of supercomputers. IBM’s BlueGene/P, one of the fastest in the world, is capable of processing over 1,000 teraflops.

Anonymous said...

Word of the day: Bipartisan
is used to indicate that something is created o supported by both sides. Usually, it refers to the major political parties in a country.

Maria E Wahlenberg

Anonymous said...

Trudge (trŭj) means to walk slowly, heavily or in a laborious way. It can also be used as a noun, referring to a long or cumbersome walk.

Maria Rodriguez - Trelles

Anonymous said...

An algorithm (ăl’gə-rĭTH’əm) is a procedure defined to solve a problem, usually structured in steps. The algorithm takes an input, carries the steps and then produces an output. Google, for instance, uses an algorithm to find the most relevant web pages on the Internet whenever your perform a search query.

-Judith B