Word of the Day
: August 9, 2007transpontine
playWhat It Means
1 : situated on the farther side of a bridge
2 : situated on the south side of the Thames
transpontine in Context
Bella recommended a transpontine restaurant for our evening rendezvous, so we took a cab across the East River from our hotel in Manhattan and met her in Queens.
Did You Know?
Usually the prefix "trans-," meaning "across," allows for a reciprocal perspective. Whether you're in Europe or America, for example, transoceanic countries are countries across the ocean from where you are. But that's not the way it originally worked with "transpontine." The "pont-" in "transpontine" is from the Latin "pons," meaning "bridge," and the bridge in this case was, at first, any bridge that crossed the River Thames in the city of London. "Across the bridge" meant on one side of the river only -- the south side. That's where the theaters that featured popular melodramas were located, and Victorian Londoners first used "transpontine" to distinguish them from their more respectable "cispontine" ("situated on the nearer side of a bridge") counterparts north of the Thames.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
