Not often do I come across words that make me look at
them like this one - how did the Fates know that I needed this word? I was on
Facebook, trying to find the source for another entry, and this popped up. I
stared at this for a good thirty seconds or so before deciding - this needed to
be an entry.
Scripturient
just seems to be one of those necessary words: one of the ones that combine a
lot of words into one, and are therefore either not very well known, or not
translatable into other languages. As you can see in the origin of the word,
Latin was smart – they had the word for this desire to write, but it seems to
have been a bit lost in modern English; even though it is a valid word, the use
of it is very low. From the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), we can see that
the frequency of the use of the word scripturient is “fewer than 0.01 times per
million words in typical modern English usage”.
This
is quite a sad occurrence: why stop using such a wonderful word? Did it create
some offence against you? No? Then why do you not use it] It almost physically hurts to think of
this word sitting by itself, all alone in the corner of the dictionary. Do you
realize how much you’ve hurt its feelings? Apologise now to the sweet, innocent,
wounded little adjective, and you might be forgiven.
Etymology: < Latin sripturient-, present participle of late Latin scripturīre to desire to write, < Latin script-, scrībĕre to write.
(words 250, not inclusive of origin)
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