Highlight

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Dr. Goodword
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Highlight

Postby Dr. Goodword » Wed Jun 01, 2022 7:24 pm

• highlight •


Pronunciation: hai-lait • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, verb

Meaning: 1, (Noun) A brighter, more illuminated spot on something. 2. (Noun) A report of an outstanding part of something like a game, speech, or other event. 3. (Verb) Emphasize, make more prominent. 4. (Verb) Select a passage in an electronic text for editing or in a hard copy to mark text to catch attention.

Notes: Here is a compound with both a literal and figurative sense. It is authentically (unborrowed) English because we use the present participle, highlighting, as an adjective and action noun. Highlighter usually refers to a broad-tipped marker pen or a cosmetic that emphasizes facial features.

In Play: The literal sense of highlight appears in sentences like this: "Angela didn't really believe that blondes have more fun, but just to make sure she added blond highlights to her brunette hair." The figurative sense emerges in expressions like this: "Evans overcomes the impulse to watch congressional hearings, knowing highlights of them will be rebroadcast on the evening news."

Word History: Today's Good Word is a compound made up of high + light. High is cousin to Dutch hoog and German hoch, so it must come from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word with E-O variants like kewk-/kowk- "high". This origin would also predict Swedish hog, Norwegian høy, Icelandic hár, Lithuanian kaukas "bump, boil", and Russian kucha "pile, heap, stack". Light is a remnant of PIE lewk-/lowk- "light", cousin of German Licht, Dutch licht, Swedish ljus, and a distant cousin of Ancient Greek leukos "white", Latin lux (luk-s), Russian luch "ray, beam", Armenian luys, Scots Gaelic leus "ray, torch, blister" and, believe it or not, Persian roxš "light".
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David Myer
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Re: Highlight

Postby David Myer » Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:05 am

I wonder when this one was first used and who coined it?
Etymonline suggests this:

"highlight (n.)
1650s, originally of paintings, "the brightest part of a subject," from high (adj.) + light (n.). High lights came also to mean the lighter and brighter paints and colors used in making pictures (as opposed to middle tints and shade tints), and the terminology carried over into photography and engraving. The figurative sense of "outstanding feature or characteristic" is by 1855 (as highlights give effect to a picture) but was not common before c. 1920. Hairdressing sense is 1941."

Burt as far as I can see it was so rarely used before about 1925, that we should probably date it from then.


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