legerdemain
/ˈlɛd͡ʒ.əɹ.dəˌmeɪn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.66 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know."
- "[…] A deliberate man with infinite resources of patience, he was content to progress by easy stages toward the millennium. Some private legerdemain must have reconciled him to the "practical" methods that were employed. […]"
- "Chief Justice Roberts does more or less the same thing in dissent: He practices intentions-and-expectations originalism while randomly sprinkling some public-meaning originalism fairy dust over his description of his enterprise, perhaps in the subconscious hope that no one will notice the legerdemain."
- "Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints."
- "Just for a moment, absurdly over-estimating poor Zuleika’s skill, he supposed himself a victim of legerdemain."
- "Most of the time, no one really seems to notice that presentist legerdemain, perhaps because so few of us actually remember the experience of 2020 all that clearly and are clinging to hastily imposed narratives instead."
Etymology
From Middle English legerdemeyn, lechardemane, from Old French léger de main (literally “light of hand”), a phrase that meant “dexterous, skillful at fooling others (especially through sleights of hand)”, which was however treated as a noun when it was borrowed by late Middle English. The Modern French descendant léger de main of the Old French phrase is archaic but still sometimes found in older literature and simply means “skillful” without any connotation of sleight of hand.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈlɛd͡ʒ.əɹ.dəˌmeɪn/
- British English: /ˌlɛd͡ʒ.ə.dɨˈmeɪn/