Word(s) of the day...

Or, Things I learned at last night's spelling bee.

I misspelled this word:

Coeliotomy
Also celio-.
The operation of cutting into the abdominal cavity; laparotomy.
1881 Trans. Obstet. Soc. Lond. XXII. 128 If a new word was needed to supersede ‘gastrotomy’ perhaps ‘cliotomy’ would do. 1908 Practitioner Oct. 608 Anterior and posterior vaginal coeliotomy. 1954 BACON & TRIMPI in K. C. Jonas Babcock's Princ. & Pract. Surg. xliv. 1423 Celiotomy.In the doubtful or confusing case, exploratory laparotomy is advantageous.

That's from the OED. The reason I got it wrong is that coeli- is not an acceptable American spelling, like foetus, and I guessed the British spelling. But th word is easy otherwise as I remember from high school biology that whether or not an organism has an enclosed body cavity with differentiated cells on the inside and on the outside is an easy marker of complexity. Animals which almost have body cavities or whose cells are not quite specialized are described as having pseudoceloms (although I suspect the plural would be pseudocoela.)

Oddly, while celiotomy is the accepted American spelling as I stated above, I did find this word in Webster's:

Pseudocoel

So the "oe" has not altogether been replaced.



A word I got right last night:

Frankincense
1. An aromatic gum resin, yielded by trees of the genus Boswellia, used for burning as incense; olibanum; occas. the smoke from the same.
a1387 Sinon. Barthol. (Anecd. Oxon.) 42 Thus album, i. olibanum, franke ensens. c1450 Cov. Myst. (Shaks. Soc.) 8 Kynges iij With gold, myrre, and ffrankynsens. ?c1475 Sqr. lowe Degre 849 Cloves that be swete smellyng, Frankensence, and olibanum. 1552 LATIMER Serm. Gosp. vi. 188 Franckumsence to signify his priesthoode. 1645 FULLER Good Th. in Bad T. (1841) 50 He..sent Leonidas a present of five hundred talents' weight of frankincense. 1718 PRIOR Pleasure 904 Curling frankincense ascends to Baal. 1834 LYTTON Pompeii IV. iii, Odour of myrrh and frankincense.

That's an easy one to spell. It's etymology is literally incense of the Franks (or French.) That won me the game which made my competitor pissed; she had to spell:

Flammiferous
[f. L. flammifer bearing flame (f. flamm-a FLAME + -fer bearing) + -OUS.]
Bearing or producing flame.

I probably would ave gotten that right since the -iferous ending is usually pretty easy to spot and I think I got it wrong once, spelling it with only one m, I would have guessed two last night.


More words soon, I promise.

~A