• graphic •
Pronunciation: græ-fik • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Related to pictures or images. 2. Pertaining to the art of printing. 3. Vividly descriptive in minutest detail, exhaustively elaborated, completely revelatory. 4. Pertaining to or represented in a graph.
Notes: Graphic should be the adjective for graph, but its meaning has wandered way beyond that. We may extend this word by the meaningless and unspoken suffix -al, which must be included in the adverb, graphically. Graphics are visual tools—pictures, diagrams, graphs, etc.—to decorate or clarify expositions.
In Play: The basic sense of this word is "pictorial": "Henry turned his courtship with Hilda into a graphic adventure game for computers." However, this sense of the word has drifted away from its path and become suggestive: "The game had some rather graphic pictures of Hilda here and there among the adventures."
Word History: Today's Good Word was grabbed from Greek graphikos "related to writing", based on graphe "writing", the result noun for graphein "to write", which Greek made from PIE gerbh- "to scratch". Gerbh- also went into the making of English carve and crab, German Krabbe "crab", Krebs "crayfish, cancer" and krabbeln "to tickle, crawl (like a crab)", Danish and Norwegian krabbe "crab", Dutch krab "crab" and krabben "to scratch", Albanian kreh "comb", Serbian grebati "to scratch", and Macedonian grebe "scratch" (Thanks now to our old friend, grandmaster of GW suggestions since 2005, Jackie Strauss of Philadelphia, for recommending today's semantically tricky Good Word.)
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