- Today's Word
Cacophony
[kuh-KOF-uh-nee]
Definition
- (noun) A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds. It’s used to describe any loud, confusing, and unpleasant noise, often made up of many different sounds happening simultaneously.
Example
The city street was filled with a cacophony of car horns, construction work, and street vendors shouting, making it nearly impossible to hear oneself think.
Fun Fact
The word “cacophony” comes from the Greek words “kakos,” meaning “bad,” and “phone,” meaning “sound” or “voice.” It was first used in English in the 17th century to describe unpleasant sounds in music. Interestingly, its antonym is “euphony,” which describes pleasant or harmonious sounds. In literature, cacophony is sometimes used intentionally as a stylistic device to create a sense of chaos or discord, often through the use of words with harsh-sounding consonants or clashing vowels.
(adjective) Lacking substance, interest, or mature thought; naive and simplistic in a way that reveals inexperience.
The critic dismissed the debut novel as jejune — competently written, technically adequate, and utterly devoid of anything worth remembering.
Jejune derives from the Latin jejunus, meaning “fasting” or “empty” — literally describing a stomach that has not been fed. The same root gives us jejunum, the section of the small intestine named for its tendency to be found empty after death. It entered English in the 17th century carrying its literal sense of emptiness before acquiring its figurative meaning of something intellectually or creatively hollow — content that has the form of nourishment without any of the substance.