materteral
/məˈtɜɹtəɹ(ə)l/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "[A] venerable matron and her virgin sister, who had passed the great climacteric, […] exclaimed with maternal and materteral anxiety, that the legislature ought to prohibit such dangerous sports; since the unavoidable accidents, to which human life and limb are exposed, are quite sufficient without increasing the number of them by wantonness and temerity."
- "You can picture the stately materteral form— / A full-blown Atè, big with doom!"
- "An aunt is always a jocular subject. If a man foozles at golf, he does not say, 'Oh, my cousin, my brother, or my grandfather!' He says, 'Oh, my aunt!' Possibly, general, the Persian is equally deficient in the materteral instinct."
- "[T]he pure line theory demands that the offspring shall be as highly correlated with the grand-maternal or the materteral organism as with the maternal, and […] this condition was satisfied in neither case."
- "And one might say, "Without prejudice to the question whether I really have inherited ten million dollars from a rich aunt, I propose to talk and act as if I had: I will write checks for vast amounts …" It may be that stipulations about parts and wholes are, in some way that undermines my materteral analogies, unlike stipulations about aunts and legacies."
- "Only some insistent pleading (materteral rather than avuncular) had changed their mind."
Etymology
Etymology tree Latin māterteralbor. Proto-Indo-European *h₂el- Proto-Indo-European *-is Proto-Indo-European *h₂élisder.? Proto-Italic *-ālis Latin -ālisbor. Old French -albor. ▲ Latin -ālis Old French -elbor. ▲ Latin -ālisbor. Middle English -al English -al English materteral Learned borrowing from Latin mātertera (“maternal aunt”), + from -al (suffix forming adjectives). Mātertera is derived from māter (“mother”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr (“mother”)) + ‑tera (feminine form of ‑ter (suffix forming nouns)).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *méh₂tēr
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /məˈtɜɹtəɹ(ə)l/
- British English: /məˈtɜːtəɹl̩/
Usage
Inflected Forms
more materteral (comparative)
most materteral (superlative)