This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word: Pulchritudinous
This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word Is:
Although pulchritude sounds like something you’d scrape off your shoe, pulchritudinous actually means beautiful. Not just attractive, good-looking or “hot,” but overwhelmingly beautiful, to the point of leaving onlookers awestruck.
Pulchritudinous is such a fun word that it’s the one poet Kwame Alexander chose to use in his rhythmic verse novel The Crossover, when he was looking for a “cool,” and “different” word to describe the new girl at school.[1] Then, he wrote a poem about the word pulchritudinous itself:
Pulchritudinous
Having great physical
beauty and appeal.
As in: Every guy
In the lunchroom
is trying to flirt
with the new girl
because she’s so pulchritudinous.
As in: I’ve never had a girlfriend,
but if I did, you better believe
she’d be pulchritudinous.
As in: Wait a minute—
why is the pulchritudinous new girl
now talking
to my brother?[2]
Etymology:
Origin of Pulchritudinous
Pulchritude + ous, an English element which transforms nouns into adjectives. Pulchritude, meaning “beautiful, fine or graceful in any way,” is derived from the Latin pulchritudo “beauty; excellence, attractiveness.”
When originally introduced to English in the 1400s, pulchritudinous primarily appeared in philosophy, formal poetry, and aesthetic discourse.
During the 18th and 19th centuries the word pulchritudinous became a marker of educated speech, particularly in literary and aristocratic circles. It was frequently used in beauty critiques and romantic literature, to convey not mere attractiveness, but a near transcendent quality of physical beauty and grace. [3]
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Endnotes:
[1] Kwame Alexander Reads From The Crossover. ReadingRocket.org
[2] Alexander, Kwame. The Crossover. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Pg 55
[3] Explain Meaning.
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