lacuna

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“
He seizes upon that lacuna, and goes so far as to set up the tentative explanation that Burchard "perhaps purposely interrupted his Diary that he might avoid mentioning the fratricide."

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Definitions (10)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. noun An empty space or a missing part; a gap: "self-centered in opinion, with curious lacunae of astounding ignorance” (Frank Norris).
  2. noun Anatomy A cavity, space, or depression, especially in a bone, containing cartilage or bone cells.

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Examples (50)

  • Usually she found herself alone in a kind of lacuna, with people moving aside to pass her by at a safe distance. —  Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
  • If there were not still a lacuna, a hole, in my recollection of events, a rather worrisome one, about what had happened that evening, the part when I was a semiconscious drunk, I would simply have walked away. —  Magyar Venus
  • Zisser speaks for a growing consensus that there is "a lacuna, a need." —  Writings from the Middle East Forum and Middle East Quarterly.
  • Perhaps these pulled punches explain the novel's weirdest lacuna: the trial of God. —  National Review Online
  • Mehr Licht, Said Goethe -- The biggest remaining lacuna is the lack of illumination. —  TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us
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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Latin lacūna; see lagoon.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Also rarely lacune (from F.); = French lacune = Spanish lacuna, laguna = Portuguese lacuna = Italian lacuna, laguna, a pool, marsh, lake, gap, from Latin lacuna, a pit, ditch, pond, hole, hollow, cavity, from lacus, a basin, cistern, lake: see lake. Cf. lagoon, a doublet of lacuna.
 

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/ləˈkjunə/
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