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  1. desuetude love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A state of disuse or inactivity.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. Discontinuance of use, practice, custom, or fashion; disuse: as, many words in every language have fallen into desuetude.

Wiktionary

  1. n. disuse, obsolescence (for example, the state of a custom that is no longer observed nor practised)

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. The cessation of use; disuse; discontinuance of practice, custom, or fashion.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a state of inactivity or disuse

Etymologies

  1. From the French désuétude, from the Latin dēsuētūdo ("disuse"). (Wiktionary)
  2. French désuétude, from Latin dēsuētūdō, from dēsuētus, past participle of dēsuēscere, to put out of use : dē-, de- + suēscere, to become accustomed; see s(w)e- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

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Lists

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  • Prolagus what jaltcoh said, rolig! Mar 22, 2011

  • shevek Alas, desuetude has fallen into desuetude! May 25, 2008

  • jaltcoh Could you please convince them to let you write the dictionary, rolig? Mar 14, 2008

  • yarb Used often by Conrad.

    n.b. great commentary rolig. Jan 1, 2008

  • rolig The dictionaries define this word as "a state of disuse or inactivity," but that does not capture the romantic nostalgia that saturates this word. The disuse is potent precisely because of a former, not-quite-forgotten usefulness, a past vitality. Desuetude is, as it were, an etude on the passing of time. Sep 23, 2007

  • rolig The exaggerated exultation of the Futurists and Vorticists about machine-age death and destruction can partly be traced to the glut of pallid degeneration narratives on which they would have been drip-fed: dead-city poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Henri de Régnier and Gabriele D’Annunzio, wispy lyrical novels and countless atmospheric travelogues that revisited the same tropes and clichés of urban exhaustion and desuetude.
    - Patrick McGuinness, "Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism," Times Literary Supplement, 20 Dec. 2006, online: http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2512863,00.html Sep 23, 2007

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‘desuetude’ has been looked up 3764 times, loved by 14 people, added to 112 lists, commented on 6 times, and has a Scrabble score of 11.