Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- A word of uncertain meaning (see etymology) used by Shakspere in the following passage, explained as meaning either ‘blown away, exorcised’—that is, ‘renounced, rejected as evil’—or ‘puffed out, exaggerated’:
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. A Shakespearean word only once used. Empty; frivolous.
Examples
“It's not "exsufflicate" (Shakespeare, Othello 3.3.184 ed Sanders TLN 1798), a word which appears only in one spot in Shakespeare (and in the words of people like me who talk about words in Shakespeare), and so has no easily understood agreed upon meaning.”
“Were I to find a quotation of "exsufflicate" that predates Othello by 13 years, I would be VERY excited.”
“And sometimes, not having the fear of poetical, or rather of unpoetical precisians and martinets before his eyes, he did not even scruple to naturalize words for his own use from foreign springs, such as exsufflicate and deracinate; or to coin a word, whenever the concurring reasons of sense and verse invited it; as in fedary, intrinse, intrinsicate, insisture, and various others.”
Shakespeare His Life Art And Characters
“Curiously, the law is agreeing with him – which goes to show that the law, once freed of its tether to Judeo-Christian morality, has become just as deranged as Mr. Merced and his exsufflicate god.”
“Exchange me for a goat When I shall turn the business of my soul To such exsufflicate and blown surmises Matching thy inference.”
Shakespeare
“This odd and far-fetched word was made yet more uncouth in all the editions before Hanmer's, by being printed, _exsufflicate_.”
“And the Bard had many more offerings that didn’t take... “exsufflicate” comes to mind.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » How Much Did Shakespeare Embiggen the English Vocabulary?
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘exsufflicate’.
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C. S. Bird – Grandiloquent Dictionary
All the words from the Grandiloquent Dictionary.
946 of these 2700 words do not yield any results in six different dictionaries, hence many of them might be misspellings.
More in...abacinate, abcedarian, abderian, ablegate, abligurition, ablutophobia, abnormous, acarophobia, acathasia, accipitrine, accidia, accubitus and 2690 more...
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rememberers
prolix, ageusia, animadversion, anodyne, antic, arabesque, beadle, brachymetropia, colophon, desquamation, diaphoresis, diegesis and 3250 more...
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Shakespearean Neologisms
Words of which William Shakespeare was the only recorded user, at some point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (From "New-minted Coins", a list on futilitycloset.com)
bepray, bragless, compulsative, conceptious, confineless, continuantly, correctioner, disliken, exceptless, exsufflicate, foxship, insultment and 11 more...
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