• expatiate •
Printable Version Pronunciation: ek-spay-shi-eyt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive
Meaning: 1. To meander, to wander about freely without any particular destination. 2. To write or speak meanderingly, without focus or coming to a point.
Notes: This ordinary Latin borrowing lives with a large, happy family. The process noun is expatiation and the agent noun is expatiator. The adjective is expatiative, which sets up the adverb, expatiatively. Remember that English dropped the redundant [s] after ex- that was kept in Latin (see Word History).
In Play: Use this word to refer to anyone who has trouble sticking to the topic of conversation: "Too bad you’re late; you missed Maude Lynn expatiating on her grandchildren again." However, the original meaning is still there, waiting to spice up your vocabulary and conversations: "I love to walk along the country roads behind my house but I can only truly expatiate when I leave the road and explore the fields and forests."
Word History: The original sense of this Good Word is to go outside your space or off course. We borrowed it from Latin exspatiare "to wander, digress" from ex- "out of" + spatium "space, course" + are, a verbal suffix. Spatium is related to German spannen "to stretch, to span". The same stem turns up in Greek span- "to stretch" and, if you stretch things too far, it leads to Greek spanis "want, need". This sense turns up in another related Latin word without the fickle S, that comes and goes under mysterious circumstances in front of this word. The Latin word is penuria "lack of, scarcity", the source of our word, penury "poverty, destitution".
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