Small but Growing

Last week I was telling someone about my ancestry, and about how fecund my ancestors were. I had to look up the word to make sure I used it correctly. It was as recent as my grandfather’s generation for whom the adjective fecund is appropriate. My father was one of at six children (Lucille, Vernon, Lenora, Kernan, and Naomi I’ve met; one other died as a young child.) Fecund means fruitful or fertile, prolific or productive.

Fecund came to English in the early 15th century from Old French. The Old French word fecond came from the Latin word fecundus. The speculation is that the word came to Latin from a primitive indo-european root word that means “to suck or suckle”. According to my dictionary the root word is the one from which we get the word fetus.

A similar good word is superfetation. I think I came across the word superfetation when the Octomom was in the headlines. Superfetation is the fertilization of an ovum during a pregnancy already in existence. The word immediately above superfetation in my dictionary is the word superfecundation, which refers to the fertilization of more than one ovum at separate times during the same ovulation period.
Since fecund and superfetation didn’t take much space, let’s turn our attention elsewhere after a pregnant pause…

“Singularly unique” (a wonderful redundancy again), according to Wikipedia, dreamt “and its derivatives are the only English words that end in mt.” And “there are only two words in English that end -shion (though many words end in this sound). These are cushion and fashion.” (Words like pincushion and refashion are just derivative forms of these words.)
“There are only three common English words ending in -cion. These are coercion, scion, and suspicion (another is the less-common cion).”
Boldface and feedback are the shortest words that contain all the letters from a to f. There is probably no common English word that contains all letters a through g.

And with that I’m finished with the Wikipedia entry on unusual words. If you want more you’ll have to do the research for yourself.

This makes for a short entry today, but it’s longer than last Wednesday’s entry.