Alphadictionary.com

psephology

Printable Version
Pronunciation: see-fah-lê-jee Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass

Meaning: The study of elections, voting patterns, and opinion polls.

Notes: Today's Good Word is quite topical in mid-November 2020, as the president and his party bring lawsuits questioning the results of the recent election without any psephology to support them. Psephology comes with all the accoutrements of any word that contains the combining form -ology. Someone who performs this service is a psephologist who carries out psephological studies. We may speak of candidates who are psephologically ahead prior to an election.

In Play: This word refers to a serious subdiscipline of political science: "Correy Publican is in psephology; he gives us rides on his 'pollacoaster' before the election every two years." If psephology were more accurate, we would not need elections: "Jerry Mandor saw his psephological lead melt away going up to the senatorial election."

Word History: Today's Good Word is composed of Greek psephos "pebble" + logy "word, idea". Psephos reflects the early Greeks' habit of voting by dropping a pebble into one of several urns. For instance, at the end of a trial, jurors would drop a pebble into a 'guilty' or 'innocent' urn. By the 15th century Europeans used a small ball, ballotta in Italian, to do the same thing. The Italians borrowed the word ball from some Germanic language and added the diminutive suffix, -otta "small" to it. It is interesting to note that Greeks not only voted with pebbles, but with pot shards, in Greek, ostraka. These were reserved for negative votes. The names of politicians were written on the shards and any politician who received the largest number of votes over 6000 was exiled or ostracized. This part of democracy did not survive the passage of time. Should we renew it? (The mysterious Grogie of the Agora strikes again with today's most topical Good Word in the United States.)

Dr. Goodword, alphaDictionary.com

P.S. - Register for the Daily Good Word E-Mail! - You can get our daily Good Word sent directly to you via e-mail in either HTML or Text format. Go to our Registration Page to sign up today!