Thursday, April 14, 2016

Turnspit Dog

The Turnspit Dog was a short-legged, long-bodied dog bred to run on a wheel, called a turnspit or dog wheel, to turn meat. The type is now extinct. It is mentioned in Of English Dogs in 1576 under the name "Turnespete". William Bingley's Memoirs of British Quadrupeds (1809) also talks of a dog employed to help chefs and cooks. It is also known as the Kitchen Dog, the Cooking Dog, the Underdog and the Vernepator. In Linnaeus's 18th century classification of dogs it is listed as Canis vertigus. The breed was lost since it was considered to be such a lowly and common dog that no record was effectively kept of it. Some sources consider the Turnspit a kind of Glen of Imaal Terrier, others make it a relative of the Welsh Corgi.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

alicorn

alicorn n
  1. (now historical) The horn of a unicorn considered as a medical or pharmacological ingredient

Saturday, April 9, 2016

paradoxical frog

paradoxical frog ‎(plural paradoxical frogs)
  1. Pseudis paradoxa, a species of frog unusual because it is larger as a tadpole (up to 25 cm or 10 in long) than as an adult (about a quarter of that length).

Friday, April 8, 2016

Vaginismus

Vaginismus, sometimes called vaginism, is the physical or psychological condition that affects a woman's ability to engage in any form of vaginal penetration, including sexual intercourse, manual penetration, insertion of tampons or menstrual cups, and the penetration involved in gynecological examinations (pap tests).

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Dyspareunia

Dyspareunia is painful sexual intercourse due to medical or psychological causes. The symptoms are significantly more common in women than in men. The pain can primarily be on the external surface of the genitalia, or deeper in the pelvis upon deep pressure against the cervix. It can affect a small portion of the vulva or vagina or be felt all over the surface. Understanding the duration, location, and nature of the pain is important in identifying the causes of the pain.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Lungo

Lungo (Italian for "long") is a coffee beverage made by using an espresso machine to make an Italian-style coffee – short black (single or double dose or shot) with much more water (generally twice as much), resulting in a stretched coffee, a lungo.



A normal serving of espresso takes from 18 to 30 seconds to pull, and fills 25 to 60 millilitres, while a lungo may take up to a minute to pull, and might fill 130 to 170 millilitres. Extraction time of the dose is determined by the variety of coffee beans (usually a blend of Arabica and Robusta), their grind and the pressure of the machine. The optimum is obtained with 9–12 bars 130–150 ml.[citation needed]
In French it is called café allongé.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

hyperforeignism

A hyperforeignism is a type of qualitative hypercorrection that involves speakers misidentifying the distribution of a pattern found in loanwords and extending it to other environments, including words and phrases not borrowed from the language that the pattern derives from. The result of this process does not reflect the rules of either language. For example, habanero is sometimes pronounced as though it were spelled with an ñ (habañero), which is not the Spanish form from which the English word was borrowed. Hyperforeignization reflects speakers' attitudes about linguistic and cultural stereotypes, particularly those provided by popular media.
Hyperforeignisms can manifest in a number of ways, including the application of the spelling or pronunciation rules of one language to a word borrowed from another, an incorrect application of a language's pronunciation, and pronouncing anglicized words as though they were borrowed more recently. Hyperforeignisms may similarly occur when a word is thought to be a loanword from a particular language when it is not.
Although similar, words that exhibit deliberate language-play (such as pronouncing Report with a silent t in The Colbert Report or ironically pronouncing Target as /tɑːrˈʒ/ tar-ZHAY, as though it were an upscale boutique) are not, strictly speaking, hyperforeignisms. These are, instead, a way of poking fun at those who earnestly adopt foreign-sounding pronunciations of pseudo-loanwords.
Similarly, speakers who echo hyperforeign pronunciations without the intention of approximating a foreign-language pattern are also not practicing hyperforeignization; thus, pronouncing habanero as if it were spelled habañero is not a hyperforeignism if one is not aware that the word has been borrowed from Spanish.

A number of words of French origin feature a final e that is pronounced in English but silent in the original language. For example, forte (used to mean "strength" in English as in "not my forte") is often pronounced /ˈfɔːrt/ or /fɔːrˈt/, by confusion with the Italian musical term of the same spelling (but meaning "loud"), which is pronounced [ˈfɔrte]. In French, the term is pronounced [fɔʁt], with silent final e. Similarly, the noun cache is sometimes pronounced /kæʃ/, as though it were spelled either cachet(meaning "signature") or caché(meaning "hidden"). In French, the final e is silent and the word is pronounced [kaʃ]. The word cadre is sometimes pronounced /ˈkɑːdr/ in English, as though it were of Spanish origin. In French, the final e is silent [kadʁ] and a common English pronunciation is /ˈkɑːdrə/.


The j in the name of the Taj Mahal or raj is often rendered /ʒ/, but a closer approximation to the Hindi sound is //. The j in most words associated with languages of India is more accurately approximated as //.

Monday, April 4, 2016

extravasate

Adjective

extravasate ‎(comparative more extravasate, superlative most extravasate)
  1. Outside of a vessel.

Noun

extravasate ‎(plural extravasates)
  1. That which is outside a vessel (especially blood or other bodily fluids)

Verb

extravasate ‎(third-person singular simple present extravasates, present participle extravasating, simple past and past participle extravasated)
  1. To flow (or be forced) from a vessel

Sunday, April 3, 2016

ideate

ideate ‎(third-person singular simple present ideates, present participle ideating, simple past and past participle ideated)
  1. To apprehend in thought so as to fix and hold in the mind; to memorize.
  2. To generate an idea.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

sortition

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) is the process of selecting officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.

Friday, April 1, 2016

tressilate

tressilate 

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  • To be suddenly agitated; be a-quiver.

 

lordosis

  Lordosis is historically defined as an abnormal inward curvature of the lumbar spine.