cento means A hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems. It carries an Arena rating of 1711, earned across 10 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, cento ranks #198 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #507 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #1,519 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #1,626 of 17,105 for Most Storied Words.
Why “cento” is a great word
CENTO — [Noun] A literary or poetic work composed entirely of lines or passages taken from other authors. From the Latin centō ("patchwork garment, curtain, or quilt"). Unlike a "pastiche," which broadly imitates a style, or a "collage," which assembles disparate materials freely, a cento is a strict architecture of verbatim theft, its integrity dependent on the seamless suturing of orphaned phrases. It is the careful snipping of silk from a hundred discarded coats, a banquet prepared from the choicest leftovers of other feasts, a ghostly chorus composed of another poet’s cadences—an elegant testament that all creation is, in the end, a form of rearrangement.
Etymology
From Latin cento (“patchwork garment”).
noun
- A hotchpotch, a mixture; especially a piece made up of quotations from other authors, or a poem containing individual lines from other poems.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- centoist 74% match — One who compiles a cento, or collection of writings by various authors. vs cento →
- centonical 73% match — Of or pertaining to a cento (work quoting from other authors). vs cento →
- centonism 72% match — The composition of a cento (poem); the act or practice of composing centos. vs cento →
- centonate 68% match — A piece composed according to the rules of centonization. vs cento →
- hodgepodge 62% match — A collection containing a variety of miscellaneous things. vs cento →
- collectanea 58% match — A selective collection of passages from various sources or by various authors; an anthology. vs cento →
- centuplet 56% match — Synonym of hundred: A group of 100. vs cento →
- centonization 55% match — A theory about the composition of a melody or piece based on pre-existing melodic figures and formulas. vs cento →