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Today's Word "Oscitancy"

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Published in Vocabulary

oscitancy \AH-si-tehn-si\ (noun) - 1 : Yawning or a yawn, hence 2 : the drowsiness or dullness associated with yawning.

"Jack insisted that his oscitancy came more from lack of sleep than from lack of interest."

 

Latin oscitare "yawn" from os- "mouth" and citare "to move". The stem cit- is also found in "cite" and "excite". It comes from Proto-Indo-European *kei(d)/koi(d) which gave English hest "command, bidding" as in "behest" and, with the suffix -n, the Greek root kin- in kin-ein "to move" that underlies "cinema" and "kinetic".


 

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