Word of the Day
: April 12, 2026recondite
playWhat It Means
Recondite is a formal word used to describe something that is difficult to understand or that is not known by many people.
// The text addresses a technical subject using recondite vocabulary, which makes it very difficult to read.
// The candy has the perfect balance of sweet and tart, but what delights me most are the recondite facts printed inside the wrapper.
recondite in Context
“Each medical school has variations in its prerequisites, but all require a strong foundation in the sciences. This includes courses such as the notoriously recondite organic chemistry as well as biology, general chemistry, and physics.” — Richard Menger, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2025
Did You Know?
Recondite is one of those underused but useful words that’s always a boon to one’s vocabulary. Though it describes something difficult to understand, there is nothing recondite about the word’s history. It dates to the early 1600s, when it was coined from the Latin word reconditus, the past participle of recondere, “to conceal.” (“Concealed” is also a meaning of recondite, albeit an obscure one today.) Remove the re- of recondite and you get something even more obscure: condite, an obsolete verb meaning both “to pickle or preserve” and “to embalm.” Add the prefix in- to that quirky charmer and we get incondite, which means “badly put together,” as in “incondite prose.” All three words have the Latin word condere at their root; that verb is translated variously as “to put or bring together” and “to put up or store”—as in, perhaps, some pickles or preserves.
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
Unscramble the letters to reveal a word that means, broady, “difficult to understand”: RTCOEISE.
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