Pulchritude
Pronunciation
PUHL-kruh-tood
Noun
Definition
- Physical comeliness
Examples
The snowboarder's talent won her many medals, and her
pulchritude gained her much attention from sponsors looking for a spokeswoman.
"Though the actress playing the queen has the requisite
pulchritude, she lacks the gravitas to convince us that she's a 41-year-old,
with a lifetime's experience and heartache." — Lee Randall, The Edinburgh Evening News, 11 Aug. 2015
Did You Know?
If English poet John Keats was right when he wrote that
"a thing of beauty is a joy forever," then pulchritude should bring
bliss for many years to come. That word has already served English handsomely
for centuries; it has been used since the 1400s. It's a descendant of the Latin
adjective pulcher, which means "beautiful." Pulcher hasn't exactly
been a wellspring of English terms, but it did give us both pulchritude and
pulchritudinous, an adjective meaning "attractive" or
"beautiful." The verb pulchrify (a synonym of beautify), the noun
pulchritudeness (same meaning as pulchritude), and the adjective pulchrous
(meaning "fair or beautiful") are other pulcher offspring, but those
terms have proved that, in at least some linguistic cases, beauty is fleeting.
Name That Antonym
Fill in the blanks to create an antonym of pulchritude: _
nsi _ _ tl _ n _ _ s.
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