Toothsome

Use this forum to discuss past Good Words.
User avatar
Dr. Goodword
Site Admin
Posts: 7417
Joined: Wed Feb 02, 2005 9:28 am
Location: Lewisburg, PA
Contact:

Toothsome

Postby Dr. Goodword » Wed Nov 04, 2020 9:06 pm

• toothsome •


Pronunciation: tooth-sêm • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Appetizing, delectable, tasty, flavorful. 2. Good looking, attractive, even sexually so; beautiful, handsome.

Notes: I love garden path words like today's, words that lead the mind astray by looking and sounding nothing like their actual meaning. Toothsome appears to be a synonym of toothy, but its meaning is far, far from "having prominent teeth". It does come with a regular adverb, toothsomely, and a standard noun, toothsomeness.

In Play: The first sense of today's word is the least distantly related to its etymology: "Cookie Baker can always whip up a toothsome meal in a few minutes." The figurative sense is even farther removed: "Arnold was happy for his assignment to Paris, not the least because it put some distance between him and his boss's toothsome wife."

Word History: Today's Good Word is composed of tooth + -some. Tooth in Old English was toð, plural teð. Danish and Dutch tand, and German Zahn "tooth" suggest the historical presence of a Fickle N, but that isn't the case here. Old English dropped Ns regularly before consonants that do not completely stop the flow of air from the lungs (spirants), compare goose with German Gans, five with German fünf, and mouth with German Mund. The Latin word for "tooth", of course, is den(t)s from its PIE ancestor dent-/dont- "tooth. We see the Latin word in English borrowings like dental and indent. The Greek word was odontos that we see in borrowings from that language like orthodontic and mastodon. (Now let's thank Daniel Obertance of Ohio, who spotted the fascination in today's Good Word and shared it with us.)
• The Good Dr. Goodword

George Kovac
Lexiterian
Posts: 457
Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2016 11:54 am
Location: Miami

Re: Toothsome

Postby George Kovac » Thu Nov 05, 2020 12:29 am

Hmmm. Toothsome, alas, is not an antonym of “edentate” or “edentulous” which were featured as Goodwords in May of 2017.
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

Philip Hudson
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2784
Joined: Thu Feb 23, 2006 4:41 am
Location: Texas

Re: Toothsome

Postby Philip Hudson » Sun Nov 15, 2020 12:31 am

We don't use the word toothsome here in the hinterlands. If we were to, I suspect it would only be about the taste of food. We do have looksome which we use to describe a beautiful lady. Festus Haggen, one of our hinterland neighbors, used the word on the TV show Gunsmoke.
It is dark at night, but the Sun will come up and then we can see.


Return to “Good Word Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Ahrefs [Bot], Amazon [Bot], Semrush [Bot] and 46 guests