- Today's Word
Heterogeneous
het-uh-roh-JEE-nee-uhs
Definition
- (adjective) Consisting of diverse or varied parts; not uniform.
Example
The committee was composed of a heterogeneous group of experts from every field.
Fun Fact
From Greek hetero (different) and genos (kind), “heterogeneous” often describes diverse populations, mixtures, or systems. It’s a key term in science (heterogeneous solutions), social studies (heterogeneous societies), and engineering. The opposite—”homogeneous”—suggests uniformity, while heterogeneity implies richness, complexity, and often greater resilience.
(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.