Wondrous Words Wednesday
Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where you can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love. Feel free to get creative! If you want to play along, grab the button, write a post and come back and add your link to Mr. Linky!
Here are a few more words from WOMEN IN SUNLIGHT by Frances Mayes.
1. emprise – “Such an emprise takes time but was accomplished: Susan opted to close her Chapel Hill house, not sell.”
Emprise is an adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise.
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2. haruspex – “Or a poet is a haruspex, in Etruscan times the one who divined meaning and future by the markings on the exposed liver of a sacrificial animal.”
This one was pretty much defined in the sentence but I looked it up anyway. A haruspex is diviner in ancient Rome basing his predictions on inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals.
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3. caravansary – “Stunned, they see at the opposite end San Marco looming like a fairyland caravansary in a mirage in the east.”
A caravansary is an inn surrounding a court in eastern countries where caravans rest at night.
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What words do you want to celebrate today?
Wondrous words indeed — HARUSPEX is one of my favorite words ever, and I can hardly ever figure out how to use it!
best… mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Interesting words – I bet the author enjoyed using them in her novel!
Didn’t know any of them. But at least I had heard the word “caravansary” before!
Clueless on all of them!
Sisyphean is a word I learnt recently. A Sisyphean task means a task that can never be completed, named after the Greek god Sisyphus who was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity.
I think my eye would have gone right over emprise and caravansary. I would have thought enterprise and just plain caravans. I like both words, however, as they are interesting. Good eye Kathy.
Margot, I totally agree with you about ’emprise / enterprise’ and ‘caravan / caravansary’, although I really do like the sound of ‘haruspex’ 🙂
Very interesting. I like emprise… sounds like something I’d like to wow my teens with. 😉
3 more new words for me!
I knew the last one thanks to a song 😀
I read and loved that book but I remember none of those words!
All new words to me! 🙂
Wonderful words! I participated in this one today – an excellent meme indeed!
https://recipeandaread.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/wondrous-words-wednesday/
These are all new words to me, as indeed are both book and author.
I do enjoy good descriptive narrative and dialogue, but perhaps even for me, ’emprise’ and ‘caravansary’, are a little over the top, when more conventional words will do the job just as well.
Haruspex on the other hand, is an ancient word for which there is no known modern day equivalent and has such interesting historical detail, to be discovered and explored.
A great bundle of words this time and you came up trumps with them all belonging to the same book!
Thanks for hosting and sharing.
Happy Reading 🙂
Yvonne
xx
Wonderful words this week from the Sunlight book! I will try to remember/use them.