If you were to pick up and read a 19th century novel, or better yet, a 17th century novel, you would likely find yourself unfamiliar with words that appear to have been familiar at the time of first publishing. As we add new words to describe the world around us, we lose others along the way. Sometimes the change feels too utilitarian, with narrowly defined adjectives vanishing to be replaced by a growing amount of technical jargon and indecipherable slang. English seems to be losing its poetry.
Assuming you care and are bothered by any of this, what can we do? We are not powerless. Perhaps you can use technology to better advantage. Request that your AI use an older English form of the language when it answers your queries. I suspect if it cannot do that now, it will develop the talent in short order. It would probably be fun to have ChatGPT or Claude answer your questions in the language style of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain – and perhaps you’d keep old words alive in this way. If you do not want to rely on machines, though, there is another way. You can do the leg work of seeking out words and using them. That’s what I’m doing here.
First recorded in 1590–1600; from Latin nēpenthes, from Greek nēpenthés “herb for soothing,” noun use of neuter of nēpenthḗs “banishing pain,” equivalent to nē- “un-” (negative prefix) + pénth(os) “grief, pain, sorrow” + -ēs adjective suffix
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar who is driving without a poetic license.
FromTime Magazine Archive
And the search is more intense than ever for the Unspoiled Spot, where Those Who Know can get away from it all for a quiet taste of nepenthe with good food and a clean bed.
FromTime Magazine Archive
For thrill-loving tourists, for the great, near-great and notorious, Catalina had been nepenthe.
FromTime Magazine Archive
In “Evangeline” Longfellow refers to it in this line: “Crown us with asphodel flowers, that are wet with the dews of nepenthe.”
Plunged in its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature’s mystery upon you; the mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the centuries.
