Friday, November 01, 2013

Fwd: animalcule: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dictionary.com <doctor@dictionary.com>
Date: 2013/11/1
Subject: animalcule: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
To: "Hector William G." <hectorpinillos@gmail.com>

Word of the Day for Friday, November 1, 2013

animalcule \an-uh-MAL-kyool\, noun:

1. a minute or microscopic animal, nearly or quite invisible to the naked eye, as an infusorian or rotifer.
2. Archaic. a tiny animal, as a mouse or fly.

But man contemplates the universe as an animalcule would an elephant.
-- Edward Buwler-Lytton, Zanoni, 1842

He has absolutely no idea of the prodigious personage that I am, and of the microscopic animalcule that he is in comparison.
-- Marcel Proust, translated by D. J. Enright, In Search of Lost Time, 1989, originally published in 1927

Animalcule comes directly from the Neo-Latin word animalculum meaning "a small animal."

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