Wow Word of the Day: Magniloquent

A Vocabulary Vitamin chock full of lexiconical nutrients; a Word of the Day worth remembering: Magniloquent.

Magniloquent is a word that makes you think of magnificent, eloquent and elegant all smooshed together and rolled off the tongue with a flourish. And that's exactly right. Magni means great, and loqui means "to speak." So, the word of the day, magniloquence is greatspeak. Sometimes flowery, sometimes bombastic, sometimes lofty and grandiose, full of hyperbole and high flown rhetoric. Even so, magniloquent is a word that sounds as if you made it up. Like flamboyable. Speechification. Mesmerata. (Those are made up) Yet, our word of the day is perfectly legitimate, introduced in the 1600's by someone at a loss for words to express the wonders of rhetoric. "Why,it's simply . . . magniloquent," he might have sputtered.

Where have we been acquainted with magniloquence? In a scene from Hamlet. A monologue performed by Richard Burton. A poem by Dylan Thomas. An actor might wax magniloquent, a statesman might give a magniloquent speech..

But there are two sides to magniloquence. It can be a mesmerizing mix of rhythm and rhetoric, reason and rich expression. Or, it can be slick and suspiciously florid, sound and fury signifying nothing. You've heard it: The silver tongue that so easily slides around the truth

Literary quotes using our Vocabulary Vitamin, magniloquent:

"Stevens did for American poetic language what Saul Bellow was to do for prose, extending its boundaries, taking in the magniloquent, the arcane, the plainspoken, the gaudy, the low-rent."
-- Algis Valiunas, "Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose", Commentary, January 1, 1998

Marguerite Young was said to use a poetic juxtaposition of the grand with the prosaic, "a constant alternation of the magniloquent and the colloquial."
-- Constance Eichenlaub, "Marguerite Young", Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 22, 2000

Pronounce the Word of the Day: magniloquent (Click here.)

1650s, from L. magniloquus (see magniloquence). mag• nil• o• quent
(māg-nĭl'ə-kwənt) adjective
Lofty and extravagant in speech; grandiloquent.

[Back formation from magniloquence , grandiloquence , from Latin magniloquentia : magnus , great ; see meg- in Indo-European roots + loquēns , loquent- , present participle of loquī , to speak ; see tolk ^w - in Indo-European roots.]
mag• nil'o• quence n. , mag• nil'o• quent• ly adv.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
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