Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An archaic word, phrase, idiom, or other expression.
- noun An archaic style, quality, or usage.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The adoption or imitation of that which is antiquated or out of use; especially, the use of archaic words or fòrms of speech.
- noun The quality of being archaic; antiquity of style, manner, or use, as in art or literature; especially, in art, the appearance of traces of the imperfect conception or unskilful handling of tools and material belonging to an art before the time of its highest development. See
the archaic , under archaic. - noun That which is archaic; especially, an antiquated or obsolete word, expression, pronunciation, or idiom.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun An ancient, antiquated, or old-fashioned, word, expression, or idiom; a word or form of speech no longer in common use.
- noun Antiquity of style or use; obsoleteness.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The adoption or imitation of
archaic words or style. - noun An archaic word, style, etc.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the use of an archaic expression
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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To have branded the latest menace with so retro an epithet as “communism”—a byword for archaism and failure—would not be as morally resonant.
Magic and Mayhem Derek Leebaert 2010
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As for the archaism, that is well enough for those who like it.
The Translations of Beowulf A Critical Bibliography Chauncey Brewster Tinker 1919
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In the Nouvel Observateur magazine last week, editor Laurent Joffrin wrote that an "indulgence of overly insistent advances, which end up as affronts to the dignity of women, are a French archaism which is broadly spread across all political parties and all milieus".
How Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest awoke a dormant anger in the heart of France's women 2011
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The greybeards hated the archaism of Burne-Jones's dense application of scumbled and rubbed watercolour, designed to mimic the tempera techniques of early renaissance painters.
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Sigurd and Gudrún is an exercise in conscious archaism not just in subject matter, and not just in poetic form and idiom.
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It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.
Larry Strauss: State of the Union -- What Will I Tell My Students? Larry Strauss 2011
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"Steeped in effective 19th-century archaism, yet steely in sustaining the story, the prose is as poetic as it is violent."
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I think it might be a faux-archaism, but am not quite sure – yet.
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(R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’
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It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.
Larry Strauss: State of the Union -- What Will I Tell My Students? Larry Strauss 2011
chained_bear commented on the word archaism
Archaic is one of my favorite words, yet I've never actually heard this one.
"He spoke a perfectly fluent but agreeably accented Spanish filled with pleasant archaisms, which reminded Stephen of the English in the former northern colonies..."
--O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea, 177
March 14, 2008