- Today's Word
Heterodox
HET-er-uh-doks
Definition
(adjective) Not conforming to accepted or traditional beliefs or standards.
Example
Her heterodox views on education reform drew both criticism and applause.
Fun Fact
Heterodox blends Greek heteros (other) and doxa (opinion), and it’s long been used to describe those who break away from religious, political, or philosophical orthodoxy. Unlike “heretical,” which can imply moral wrongdoing, heterodox often signals intellectual bravery or innovation. It’s frequently used to describe economists, artists, and thought leaders who challenge convention without necessarily rejecting it entirely.
(noun) The state of being excessively overweight; an abundance of body fat significantly beyond what is considered healthy.
The Victorian novelist described his villain with pointed corpulence — every detail of the man’s physical excess carefully deployed to signal moral failure to a readership primed to make exactly that connection.
Corpulence derives from the Latin corpulentia, meaning “fleshiness,” rooted in corpus — “body.” The same root gives us corporeal, corpse, incorporate, and corps — a family of words all built around the physical body in its various states. It entered English in the 15th century as a neutral medical descriptor before acquiring the moral weight that Victorian literature in particular loaded onto it, transforming a clinical observation into a character judgment.