logomancy · noun — divination with words. It carries an Arena rating of 1635, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, logomancy ranks #627 of 17,140 for Most Whimsical Words, #1,241 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #2,808 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #3,172 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words.
Why “logomancy” is a great word
LOGOMANCY — [Noun] Divination by means of words or speech. From the Greek logos ("word, speech") + -mancy ("divination, prophecy"). Unlike onomancy (which seeks fate in the letters of a name) or stichomancy (which extracts truth from a preordained line of text), logomancy is the broader act of listening for oracles in the raw flow of language itself. It is the frantic parsing of a politician's rhetoric for unintended truths, the weight of a slip of the tongue in a quiet room, or the desperate search for a sign in a stranger's casual remark—a testament to the faith that meaning, like a ghost, haunts the very air between us.
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Etymology
From logo- + -mancy.
noun
- Divination with words.e.g.“He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy.” — 1955, Vladimir Nabokov, chapter 23, in Lolita, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, published August 1958, →OCLC, part 2, pages 251–252:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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