Word of the Day

: November 1, 2017

apodictic

adjective ap-uh-DIK-tik

What It Means

: expressing or of the nature of necessary truth or absolute certainty

apodictic in Context

"On the humbler level of recorded evidence, what is one to make of a thinker-scholar who
ruled with apodictic, magisterial certainty that 'Shakespeare's tragedies are second-class
with the exception of Lear'?" — George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1993

"Her writing, collected in a volume titled Sweet Nothings (a title intended, one suspects, to ward off serious criticism), has an apodictic, take-it-or-leave-it quality: 'Art is a low-risk, high-reward crime.'" — Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Winter 2016

Did You Know?

Apodictic is a word for those who are confident about that of which they speak. It's a handy word that can describe a conclusive concept, a conclusive person, or even that conclusive person's conclusive remarks. A well-known close relative of apodictic is paradigm ("an outstandingly clear or typical example"); both words are built on Greek deiknynai, meaning "to show." More distant relatives (from Latin dicere, a relative of deiknynai that means "to say") include diction, dictate, edict, and predict.