black swan
/blæk ˈswɑn/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.83 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Something believed impossible or not to exist, especially if an example is subsequently found; also, something extremely rare; a rara avis.
noun
A rare and hard-to-predict event with major consequences.
Example Sentences
- "Mankind were wrong, it seems, in concluding that all swans were white: are we also wrong, when we conclude that all men's heads grow above their shoulders, and never below, in spite of the conflicting testimony of the naturalist Pliny? As there were black swans, though civilised people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them, may there not also be "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," notwithstanding a rather less perfect unanimity of negative testimony from all observers? Most persons would answer No; it was more credible that a bird should vary in its colour, than that man should vary in the relative position of his principal organs."
- "If you tell me that there is or that there is not a black swan or a white raven, I want to know where you mean; and that you can only show me,—no description will answer the purpose."
- "The original propounder of 'all swans are white' presumably based it on a sample of hundreds or thousands; but the verifications before the Australian black swan was discovered must have run into millions"
- "This concept of "observation" is not like that of seeing a black swan, to mention a famous classical example. New particles leave signatures in the detector that on an event by event basis cannot be distinguished by other processes (background)."
- "I do but ſpeake in the perſon of Demetrius, & vnder Hippolita ſhadovv vvhat I intend to the rare, and neuer enough vvondred at Moſpa, the black ſvvan of beauty, & madg-hovvled of admiration."
- "A Virgin too, untouch'd, and chaſte, / VVhom Man ne'er took about the VVaiſte. / She's a rare Bird! find her vvho can, / And much reſembling a black Svvan."
Etymology
From Middle English blak swan, calqued from a Latin quotation from Satire VI (written late 1st century – early 2nd century B.C.E.) of the Roman poet Juvenal: “Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno [a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan]!”. Equivalent to black + swan. Sense 2.1 (“something believed impossible or not to exist”) is from the fact that all swans were thought to have white plumage until black swans were discovered in Australia in the 17th century by Dutch explorers. Sense 2.2 (“rare and hard-to-predict event”) was popularized by the Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007): see the quotation.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /blæk ˈswɑn/
- British English: /blæk ˈswɒn/