Abstract Nonsense

Posts tagged with "Words"

An Afternoon Reading the Dictionary

I’m a heavy user of Apple’s Look Up for words on macOS. With a quick force click you can instantly summon the dictionary or thesaurus for a selected word, which removes the friction of pursuing “hmm, that’s a new word - what does it mean?”

I’ve been collecting new words I discover in an Apple Note for years and recently started migrating my list to a living blog page. Rather than manually collecting the macOS built-in Oxford Dictionary definition for each word (of which I have hundreds), I thought I’d script it. It turns out that Oxford Dictionaries has a very neat API, but unfortunately it’s exorbitantly expensive.

A Living Log of Lexical Learnings

This is a living document in which I collect new words I encounter in my reading and daily life. All definitions herein are from the Oxford Dictionary of English unless otherwise stated.

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anadiplosis: wikitionary, the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause: Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

antimetabole: wiktionary, the technique of repeating a phrase while reversing the order of certain elements or its grammatical structure, as a form of juxtaposition: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.