unwisdom
/ˌʌnˈwɪzdəm/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "And all we conſyderynge her gracyous and charytable mynde, ſo unyuerſally, and conſyderyng the redyneſs of mercy and pyte in our Savyour Jheſu, may ſay, by lamentable complaynt of our unwyſedome, unto hym. Ah Domine! ſi fuiſſes hic—Ah my Lorde! yf thou had ben preſente, […]"
- "Eccle[siasticus] 21. 15. […] Forſooth vnvviſedome is, &c. [i.e., which is plenteous in euill.] Sixtus [Pope Sixtus V] and the Louans, reading it amiſſe."
- "[T]he French government has committed the unwisdom of persecuting the Saint-Simonians. Persecution is always a bungler's craft, that in trying to stop one hole opens two."
- "The Earth is good, bountifully sends food and increase; if man's unwisdom did not intervene and forbid."
- "But as the sentence of Clement [Pope Clement VII] sealed the fate of the Nun of Kent [Elizabeth Barton], so the unwisdom of his successor [Pope Paul III] bore similarly fatal fruits."
- "A very common engine fault, leaking joints, provides an example of the unwisdom of undertaking design modification without full service experience. […] After only a short period of service, however, so many railways requested a reversion to the original type that the modification had to be abandoned."
Etymology
PIE word *né From Middle English unwisdom (“lack of wisdom, foolishness; an instance of this”), from Old English unwīsdōm, from un- (prefix denoting absence or negation of something) + wīsdōm (“wisdom”) (from Proto-Germanic *wīsadōmaz (“wise judgment, wisdom”), from *wīsaz (“knowledgeable, wise”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“to know; to see”)) + *-dōmaz (suffix forming nouns denoting the condition or state of [the suffixed word]) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- (“to do; to place, put”))). The word was apparently obsolete in the 18th century, but was revived from the 19th century and possibly popularized by its use in the works of the Scottish author and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881): see the quotations. By surface analysis, un- (prefix denoting a lack of something) + wisdom.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *weyd-, unwisdom, unwīsdōm, *wīsadōmaz, *dʰeh₁-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌʌnˈwɪzdəm/
- British English: /(ˌ)ʌnˈwɪzdəm/