Word of the Day
: January 14, 2018demiurge
playWhat It Means
: one that is an autonomous creative force or decisive power
demiurge in Context
"But it is difficult to create a world, even a tiny one, and some authors are more successful than others at playing demiurge…." — Sergio Ruzzier, The New York Times, 9 Oct. 2016
"Gladstone, a formidable chancellor though an indifferent prime minister, was certainly an intellectual. Like Churchill, however, he was unclassifiable. Such demiurges transcend categories." — Bruce Anderson, The Daily Telegraph (London), 8 May 2014
Did You Know?
In the Platonic school of philosophy, the Demiurge is a deity who fashions the physical world in the light of eternal ideas. In the Timaeus, Plato credits the Demiurge with taking preexisting materials of chaos and arranging them in accordance with the models of eternal forms. Nowadays, the word demiurge can refer to the individual or group chiefly responsible for a creative idea, as in "the demiurge behind the new hit TV show." Demiurge derives, via Late Latin, from Greek dēmiourgos, meaning "artisan," or "one with special skill." The demi- part of the word comes from the Greek noun dēmos, meaning "people"; the second part comes from the word for worker, ergon. Despite its appearance, it is unrelated to the word urge.
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Word Family Quiz
Unscramble the letters to create a word based on Greek dēmos that refers to an outbreak of a disease over a wide geographic area: NECMAIPD.
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