concitation means rousing, stirring up; excitement, agitation. It carries an Arena rating of 1477, earned across 16 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, concitation ranks #1,660 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #2,750 of 17,163 for Funniest Words, #3,232 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #3,306 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words.
Why “concitation” is a great word
A forceful stirring up or rousing, particularly of public feeling or mass emotion. From Latin concitātiōnem, accusative of concitātiō, from concitāre ("to stir up, arouse"), from con- (intensive prefix) + citāre ("to set in motion, rouse"). First attested in English in 1534. Unlike "agitation," which emphasizes a disturbed, anxious state, or "stimulation," which suggests an invigorating prompt, concitation is the formal, archaic name for the act of incitement itself. It is the demagogue's rhetoric crackling through a square, the sudden, collective intake of breath before a riot, the drumbeat that turns a crowd into a mob—the precise moment a latent force is summoned into terrible, kinetic being.
Etymology
From Latin concitātiōnem, from concitāre. Compare concitate.
noun
- Rousing, stirring up; excitement, agitation.e.g.“So long as our pulse panted, and we feele any concitation, so long remit we the partie[…].” — 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 31, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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