recondite

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I think you might have been more--recondite--in your choice of an admiral, Richard Ah?--you surprise me But why?

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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)

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Examples (50)

  • 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
  • It does not weary the reader with critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings and recondite oracles in the plain 'yea and 'nay' of life. —  Elizabeth Fry
  • Stop. I vow that the rest of this review will not seek impossibly and involuntarily to emulate the ornate, recondite, witty, yet altogether engrossing and captivating style that Davidson employs in these pages. —  Asimov'sSF,September2007
  • And that those philologists who had represented it as an agglutinated mass , and capable of the most recondite, pronominal, and tensal meanings, exceeding those of Greece and Rome, had no clear conceptions of what they were speaking of. —  Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers
  • "It served as a kind of recondite, East Village version of camp, classical Hollywood." —  Advocate.com Daily News
 

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deodar · leucomorph · deodand · pelgrane · blister-bush · russet · black burdock · spatterlight · gunmetal · carrack · concertina

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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/
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