recondite

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Yet for every orrery, venturi, or vernier that endures in recondite realms, some vigorous new eponym eventually will shoulder its way into our daily vocabulary and ultimately be confirmed as a legitimate part of the language by its appearance in a dictionary.

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Definitions (9)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. adjective Not easily understood; abstruse. See Synonyms at ambiguous.
  2. adjective Concerned with or treating something abstruse or obscure: recondite scholarship.
  3. adjective Concealed; hidden.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (4)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (1)

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Examples

  • If Smith & Elder considered “The Marble Faun” too recondite a title for the English public, what better name could they have hit upon than “The Romance of Monte Beni”? —  The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • It does not weary the reader with critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings and recondite oracles in the plain —  Elizabeth Fry
  • Nature engenders the gravity of bodies by a process so recondite, so completely beyond the reach of our senses and the ordinary resources of human intelligence, that the philosophers of antiquity, who supposed that they could explain every thing mechanically according to the simple evolutions of atoms, excepted gravity from their speculations. —  Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men
  • Yet for every orrery, venturi, or vernier that endures in recondite realms, some vigorous new eponym eventually will shoulder its way into our daily vocabulary and ultimately be confirmed as a legitimate part of the language by its appearance in a dictionary. —  VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol IX No 2
  • “To me,” wrote Cairns to George Gilfillan in 1849, “love seems infinitely higher than knowledge and the noblest distinction of humanity — the humble minister who wears himself out in labours of Christian love in an obscure retreat as a more exalted person than the mere literary champion of Christianity, or the recondite professor who is great at Fathers and Schoolmen. —  Principal Cairns
 

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Words tagged recondite

asthenic · bazil · binnacle · cachectic · carrack · catechumen · collegium · concertina · deodand · deodar · ecclesiarch · epicene · erb · fetor · flux · forecastle

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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 reconditus, past participle of recondere, to put away : re-, re- + condere, to put together, preserve; see dhē- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from Middle English *recondit, recondet, from Old French recondit =Spanish recóndito =Portuguese Italian recondito, hidden, secret, etc., from Latin re-conditus, put away, hidden, secret, past participle of recondere, put back again, put away, hide, from re-, back-, + condere, put together: see condiment, condite.
 

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/rəˈkɑndɪt/
by American Heritage

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