culteranismo means A literary style during the Baroque period of Spain, characterized by a very ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and a message that is complicated by a sea of metaphors and complex syntactical order. It carries an Arena rating of 1382, earned across 43 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, culteranismo ranks #282 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #968 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #2,677 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #3,471 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words.
Why “culteranismo” is a great word
CULTERANISMO — [Noun] A literary style of the Spanish Baroque period characterized by an ostentatious, Latinate vocabulary and complex syntax that often obscures meaning. Borrowed from Spanish culteranismo, a blend of culto ("cultivated, refined") and luteranismo ("Lutheranism"), pejoratively implying an excessive, heretical devotion to ornate style. Unlike conceptismo, which pursues concise, witty conceptual density, or euphuism, a specific English prose style of balanced antitheses, culteranismo is a Spanish poetic devotion to labyrinthine form. It is the gilded filigree that outshines the saint, a sentence unfolded like a map, and the preference for "crystalline" over "glass" for its august Latin root—a style that worships not the thing described, but the distant, difficult act of description itself.
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish culteranismo.
noun
- A literary style during the Baroque period of Spain, characterized by a very ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and a message that is complicated by a sea of metaphors and complex syntactical order.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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