Word of the Day

: March 30, 2017

transpicuous

adjective tran-SPIK-yuh-wus

What It Means

: clearly seen through or understood

transpicuous in Context

"Measuring and studying a small business is not inherently different from doing it for a large corporation if its financial reports are set up to be transpicuous and to make its activities transparent and there is an incentive for making them so." — Isabel Anderson, The Financial Post (Canada), 28 Jan. 2006

"… the surfaces of his literary work were so terribly transpicuous, so banally boring—simple declaratives rife with simple vocabulary." — Joshua Cohen, Harper's, July 2012

Did You Know?

Transpicuous is derived from the Latin word transpicere, meaning "to look through." Transpicere, in turn, is a formation that combines trans-, meaning "through," and specere, meaning "to look" or "to see." If you guessed that transpicuous is related to conspicuous, you're correct. It's also possible to see a number of other specere descendants in English, including aspect, circumspect, expect, inspect, perspective, and suspect. Another descendant of specere, and a close synonym of transpicuous, is perspicuous, which means "clear and easy to understand," as in "a perspicuous argument." (Per-, like trans-, means "through.") There's also perspicacious, meaning "keen and observant." (You might say that perspicuous and transpicuous mean "able to be seen through," whereas perspicacious means "able to see through.")