• Today's Word

Disparate

🔊 Listen to the word Disparate

DIS-puh-rit

Definition

(adjective) So fundamentally different in kind that comparison or combination is difficult or impossible.

Example

The committee was made up of disparate voices — a retired military general, a teenage climate activist, a Wall Street banker, and a rural farmer — who somehow had to reach a single consensus.

Word Origin

Disparate comes from the Latin disparatus, the past participle of disparare — “to separate” — built from dis- (“apart”) and parare (“to prepare” or “to arrange”). It entered English in the 16th century, used to describe things so fundamentally unlike one another that they resist any meaningful comparison or grouping. It shares its Latin root with separate, making the two words distant cousins whose shared ancestry reflects their shared meaning.

Fun Fact

The challenge of bringing disparate elements together is the foundation of one of music’s most celebrated creative traditions — the mashup. When DJ Danger Mouse released The Grey Album in 2004, blending Jay-Z’s The Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album, he combined two of the most disparate musical worlds imaginable and produced something that music critics called revelatory. EMI’s subsequent legal attempts to suppress it only amplified its reach, making it one of the most downloaded albums in internet history and proving that disparate elements, forced together with enough creativity, can produce something neither could achieve alone.