Words of the day

Word of the Day for Thursday, July 12, 2012

paronymous \puh-RON-uh-muhs\, adjective:

Containing the same root or stem, as the words wise and wisdom.

 The sentence seems to reverberate with echoes of
 assonance—another distinctive trait of Haweke's writing often
 enriched with alliterative patterns or even rhymes—on both sides
 of the two central words: “pale petal,” whose juxtaposition
 involves an anagramatical and paronymous variation.
 — Heide Ziegler, Facing Texts

 This in itself is a significant achievement in a language so
 flowery and paronymous to the extent that exaggeration,
 especially at that time of its literary history, is widely
 considered to be one of its inherent characteristics.
 — Sabry Hafez, The Quest for Identities

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Paronymous stems from the Greek roots para- meaning “beside” and
onoma meaning “a name.”