Word of the Day

: July 8, 2018

lucubration

noun loo-kyuh-BRAY-shun

What It Means

: laborious or intensive study; also : the product of such study — usually used in plural

lucubration in Context

The book is a collection of lucubrations on the effect advancements in computer science have on economic policy.

"Surely when we talk about our mental lives we're simply thinking of everything that makes human beings special, different—our thoughts, our language-based lucubration." — Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books, 21 Nov. 2016

Did You Know?

Imagine someone studying through the night by the light of a dim candle or lamp. That image demonstrates perfectly the most literal sense of lucubration. Our English word derives from the Latin verb lucubrare, meaning "to work by lamplight." (That Latin root is related to lux, the Latin word for "light.") In its earliest known English uses, lucubration named both nocturnal study itself and a written product thereof. By the 1800s, however, the term had been broadened to refer to any intensive study (day or night), or a composition, especially a weighty one, generated as a result of such study. Nowadays, lucubration is most often used in its plural form and implies pompous or stuffy scholarly writing.