• logorrhea •
Printable Version Pronunciation: lah- or lo-gê-ree-ê • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, mass (no plural)
Meaning: Excessively wordy, incoherent speech, a storm of gibberish, possibly the result of mental instability.
Notes: Although today's Good Word means about the same as 'excessive wordiness', its rhyme with diarrhea adds a pejorative vividness that the phrase does not have. In fact, the phrase verbal diarrhea is often used when today's Good Word would be more discreet and impressive. Remember to double the R in this and all other words with this ending that refer to a great flow. Outside the US you are allowed to spell today's word logorrhoea. You have your choice of adjectives: logorrheal or logorrhetic.
In Play: When wordiness just isn't quite enough, today's Good Word is what you need: "When Tryon Makepeace saw his daughter's new eyebrow rings with matching lip rings, he went from silence to sputtering logorrhea in fewer than five seconds." Notice the pejorative implication here: Tryon was not uttering flattering niceties. Radio and TV run on logorrhea: "Lacie McBride seems to enjoy the ceaseless logorrhea of the political talk shows on radio and TV."
Word History: Today's Good Word is a compound made up of Greek logos "word, idea" + rhe-in "to flow, run." Logos goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root log-/leg- that is also behind the roots of lexical (lex = leg-s-), as well as legislate and legal. The semantic connection apparently comes from an era when the word of the king was the law. Rhein comes from a root that originally had an initial S, sreu-, which picked up a T in the Germanic languages producing German Strom and English stream. (Today we thank Chris Berry for the regular stream of excellent Good Words he suggests to us.)
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