When.com Web Search

Search results

  1. Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
  2. Superfluous - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluous

    Superfluous means unnecessary or excessive. It may also refer to: It may also refer to: Superfluous precision, the use of calculated measurements beyond significant figures

  3. Cruft - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruft

    In other words, rubbage". [2] Its author Peter Samson later explained that this was meant in the sense of "detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for 'crufty,' a word I didn't hear until some years later". [2] In 2008 it was also used to refer to alumni who remain socially active at MIT. [3]

  4. Pleonasm - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm

    In contrast, formal English requires an overt subject in each clause. A sentence may not need a subject to have valid meaning, but to satisfy the syntactic requirement for an explicit subject a pleonastic (or dummy pronoun) is used; only the first sentence in the following pair is acceptable English: "It's raining." "Is raining."

  5. List of common false etymologies of English words - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_false...

    [70] [71] "Isle" comes ultimately from Latin īnsula, meaning "island"; "island" comes ultimately from Old English īegland, also meaning "island", or technically "island land" (cf. Icelandic ey "island"). The spelling island with an S, however, is indeed due to the influence of isle.

  6. Glossary of rhetorical terms - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_rhetorical_terms

    Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.

  7. Nomen illegitimum - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomen_illegitimum

    Although the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants uses Latin terms as qualifiers for taxon names (e.g. nomen conservandum for "conserved name", and nomen superfluum for "superfluous name"), the definition of each term is in English rather than Latin. [1] The Latin abbreviations are widely used by botanists and ...

  8. Thesaurus - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesaurus

    Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. A modern english thesaurus. A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms ...

  9. Verbosity - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbosity

    Overwriting is a simple compound of the English prefix "over-" ("excessive") and "writing", and as the name suggests, means using extra words that add little value. One rhetoric professor described it as "a wordy writing style characterized by excessive detail, needless repetition, overwrought figures of speech, and/or convoluted sentence ...