Word of the Day

adjective

Of the value of having a library at hand for a liberal education, Coleridge wrote: "There is no way of arriving at any sciential end but by finding it at every step."

"Whether editors should reproduce altered texts of poems because authors wanted them to do so, and whether literary scholarship has a sciential function at all … — these are extremely important questions." — From a review by Terence Allan Hoagwood in Criticism, September 22, 1997

You might expect "sciential," which derives from Latin "scientia" (meaning "knowledge"), to be used mostly in technical papers and descriptions of scientific experiments. In truth, however, "sciential" has long been a favorite of playwrights and poets. It appears in the works of Ben Jonson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, among others. Keats made particularly lyrical use of it in his narrative poem "Lamia," which depicts a doomed love affair between the Greek sorceress Lamia and a human named Lycius. In the poem, Hermes transforms Lamia from a serpent into a beautiful woman, "Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain."

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