• concord •
Pronunciation: kahn-kord • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, mass (No plural)
Meaning: 1. Harmony, agreement, consonance. 2. A treaty establishing peaceful relations between two parties. 3. (Linguistics) Grammatical agreement. 4. (Music) A combination of notes pleasing to the ear, requiring no resolution in following chords.
Notes: Today's word is the antonym of discord. It comes with two equally rare adjectives, concordant and concordial. Concordance is the quality noun, but it also can refer to an alphabetical list of words in a text, identified by the number of the page on which they appear in the text.
In Play: Most often today's word is a near synonym of agreement: "William Arami and June McBride could not reach concord on the question of which the day their marriage should take place on." The difference between the two is that today's word also implies peace: "Murphy wondered whether there would ever be concord again in the Middle East or the US Congress."
Word History: Today's Good Word is made up of the prefix con- "(together) with" + cord(is) "of the heart". Con- descended quite naturally from PIE k'om "beside, near, with", also underlying Lithuanian su "with", Russian s(o) "with", German ge-, collective noun prefix, as Gebirge "mountain range" from Berg "mountain", Irish cuma "appearance, shape", Welsh cyf- "(together) with, similar", and Cornish ken "other(wise)". Cor, cordis descended from PIE k'erd-/k'ord- "heart", also found in Greek kardia "heart, center", Albanian kërthizë "navel", Irish croi, croidhe "heart", Welsh craidd "core, essence", Hindi keandra "heart, center", Marathi hŗdaya "heart", Russian serdce "heart" and seredina "center", Serbian srce "heart" and sreda "Wednesday" (center day of the week), Lithuanian širdies "heart", Latvian sirds "heart", Dutch hart "heart", German Herz "heart", Norwegian hjerte "heart", and English heart. (We are all in concord that we pay grandmaster of GW suggestions William Hupy a hearty "thank-you" for today's historically rich Good Word.)
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