verecund

Verecund: Say What?

January 14, 2011 in Latest News, World News by Lacy Bryant

It seems that there is a massive interest in this word right now. The searches on Google are going crazy for this word because of people that are interested in finding out what this word means. Why are so many people searching for this term? The term that is driving the search results crazy is Verecund.

Verecund is not a very common word at all. It simply means modest, shy or bashful. These are not words that describe very many people these days so many that is why we have not heard it before. Maybe I will start using the word verecund more after reading about it.

About the only time that I can find this word used is way back in 1850 in a news article. Are all of these fancy words necessary? Can’t we just say modest, shy or bashful? I don’t know, maybe verecund makes our language more colorful.

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Modest, bashful, shy.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for this word, published back in 1916, doesn’t suggest it’s obsolete or even rare. It turns up in an article penned by an erudite columnist in the issue of The Marion Weekly Star of Ohio dated 17 February 1912, in a comment that can only make us marvel at how times have changed:

What this country needs is men who are not afraid to proclaim to the public their virtues of mind and character. Our politics is speckled with men who are so diffident and verecund they never say a word about themselves or their achievements.

The play is set in 1833 and in it characters speak Irish, Greek, Latin and English. So an obscure Latinate word fits the context perfectly: “He speaks — on his own admission — only English; and to his credit he seemed suitably verecund.”

The word is from Latin verecundus, which derives from the verb vereri, to revere or fear.