dol means the unit of measurement for pain. It carries an Arena rating of 1374, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, dol ranks #1,524 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #2,869 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #5,336 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #6,856 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words.
Why “dol” is a great word
A scientific unit for quantifying the subjective intensity of pain. From the Latin dolor ("sorrow, pain"), specifically a 20th-century clipping; first attested 1945–50. Unlike "dolor," which names the raw, aching experience of grief, or "threshold," which marks only the sharp edge of perception, the dol is a ruler laid across agony, attempting to number what resists counting. It is the clinical translation of a migraine's throb into a number on a chart, the conversion of a burn's sear into a data point, the steady beep of a monitor tracking grimaces—a valiant, futile attempt to impose objective order on the most intimate of human experiences.
Etymology
Clipping of Latin dolor (“sorrow, pain”). Doublet of dolor.
noun
- The unit of measurement for pain.
name
- A township in Lop, Hotan prefecture, Xinjiang autonomous region, China.e.g.“Journey across desert. Two Langars at 5th and 8th mile. Enter on cultivation at 14th mile, close to the village of Dol. Road excellent.” — 1893, Royal Geographical Society (Great Britain), “Journey of Carey and Dalgleish in Chinese Turkistan and Northern Tibet in 1885–7”, in Supplementary Papers, volume 3, J. Murray, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 2
- Synonym of Dol-de-Bretagne, France.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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