Word of the DaySunday, August 21, 2005
vicissitude
\vih-SIS-ih-tood; -tyood\ , noun:1.
Regular change or succession from one thing to another; alternation; mutual succession; interchange.
2.
Irregular change; revolution; mutation.
3.
A change in condition or fortune; an instance of mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another).
Quotes:
This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty.
-- Thomas Macaulay,
Max had rescued his father's gold watch through every vicissitude, but as it didn't go I took it to a watchmaker.
-- Edith Anderson, Love in Exile:An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin
It has come about that this writer, who at the beginning might have appeared in unique occupation of a marginal and peripheral world, is instead writing from the center of a historical vicissitude, utterly contemporary.
-- Elizabeth Hardwic, "Meeting V. S. Naipaul",
Origin:
Vicissitude comes from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim, in turn, probably from vices, changes.
