logorrhea
/ˌlɔ.ɡəˈɹi.ə/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.14 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Excessive and often uncontrollable speaking due to a mental disorder.
American usage; Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "These "Symbolists" are characterised by unbounded vanity and self-sufficiency; they are highly emotional; their thinking is hazy and disconnected. They suffer from "Logorrhea" or "sickly talkativeness," and are unable to perform any work which requires concentration and persistency."
- "[Jacques] Rivette, bluntly, suffers from a good case of logorrhea. Even if he had none of these rationales, he would still make long films. In interviews he speaks in endless, ebullient sentences that surround their subjects like spider's webs and sometimes suffocate them."
- "The baritone is angry, but still controlled: he does not indulge in compulsive over-rapid spurts of logorrhoeas but keeps to a 'chopped, short, hard, very pointed' staccato-like delivery, excited, but well articulated through interruptions of differing lengths."
- "His purchase of a Dictaphone no doubt encouraged his natural loquacity, his ingrained prolixity (which he himself logorrhoea)."
- "The writer should endeavor to have his observations first of all, exact, then apposite, and finally as brief as the nature of the case will admit. [...] Logorrhea and irrelevancy are the bane of a society."
- "So when I settled down that day I wrote feverishly and I wrote joyously. I wrote until my fingers were cramped and my head was empty. I surrendered to a blithe logorrhea that left me contentedly limp and lax and in need of an hour or two of open air."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *leǵ- Proto-Indo-European *-os Proto-Indo-European *lóǵos Proto-Hellenic *lógos Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos)bor. English logo- Proto-Indo-European *ser-? Proto-Indo-European *srew- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *sréweti Proto-Hellenic *hréwō Ancient Greek ῥέω (rhéō) Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Indo-European *-i-eh₂ Proto-Hellenic *-íā Ancient Greek -ίᾱ (-íā) Ancient Greek ῥοία (rhoía)bor. English -rrhea English logorrhea From logo- (prefix meaning ‘word; speech’) + -rrhea (suffix meaning ‘flowing’), probably modelled after verbal diarrhea. logo- is derived from Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos, “word; speech; utterance”) (from λέγω (légō, “to say, speak; to arrange; to gather”), from Proto-Indo-European *leǵ- (“to collect, gather”)), while -rrhea is from ῥοία (rhoía, “a flow, flux”) (from ῥέω (rhéō, “to flow”), from Proto-Indo-European *srew- (“to flow”)).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌlɔ.ɡəˈɹi.ə/
- British English: /ˌlɒ.ɡəˈɹɪ.ə/
Usage
- American usage
- Countable
- Humorous
- Uncountable