Word of the Day

Sunday, October 29, 2006

contemporaneous

\kuhn-tem-puh-RAY-nee-uhs\ , adjective;

Originating, existing, or occurring at the same time.

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Quotes:

The best sources for a historian are those that provide a contemporaneous account of the events under scrutiny.

-- Jan T. Gross, Neighbors

As a version of female power, Spiritualism and its sister, the Victorian flowering of occult magic, became a handmaid of the vigorous contemporaneous crusade for female emancipation.

-- Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats

The Greek chronicler Polybius, recording the sack of Rome by Gauls in 387 BC, notes laboriously that it was contemporaneous with the peace of Antalcidas and the siege of Rhegium by Dionysius, and that it happened nineteen years after the battle of Aegospotami and sixteen years before the battle of Leuctra.

-- Damian Thompson, The End of Time

As a result of this focus on radical individuality, a composer's music was expected to differ stylistically from the music of all earlier composers and also from that of other contemporaneous writers, and it was judged in large part by the extent to which it moved forward, breaking new stylistic ground.

-- Charles Hamm, Irving Berlin

Origin:

Contemporaneous is from Latin contemporaneus, from con-, com-, "with, together" + tempus, tempor-, "time."