maugre means notwithstanding, despite everything. It carries an Arena rating of 1700, earned across 74 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, maugre ranks #1,095 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #1,400 of 17,163 for Funniest Words, #1,546 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #2,223 of 17,151 for The Improbable.
maugre is pronounced /ˈmɔː.ɡə/.
Why “maugre” is a great word
MAUGRE — [Adverb, Noun, Preposition] As a preposition or adverb: in spite of, notwithstanding; as a noun: ill will or spite. From Middle English maugre, from Anglo-Norman malgré, from mal ("bad, ill") + gré ("pleasure, will, favor") (from Latin gratum, "pleasing thing"). Unlike "despite," a sleek modern hinge devoid of emotional weight, or "notwithstanding," a dry legalism still in bureaucratic service, maugre is an archaic stone in the tongue, heavy with the dual sense of obstacle and the spite that placed it there. It is the knight riding out maugre the storm, the gnarled apple tree bearing fruit in a salted field, and the heart beating maugre the grief that fills it—a quiet testament to endurance wrested from the clenched hand of malice.
Etymology
From Middle English maugre, from Anglo-Norman malgré, from mal (“bad”) + gre (“pleasure, grace”) (from Old French, from Latin gratum).
adv
- Notwithstanding, despite everything.e.g.“cruell Mulciber would not obay / His threatfull pride, but did the more augment / His mighty rage, and with imperious sway / Him forst (maulgre) his fiercenesse to relent, / And backe retire […]” — 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book III, canto xi:
prep
- In spite of, notwithstanding.e.g.“He saugh a mayde walkinge him biforn, / Of whiche mayde anon, maugree hir heed, / By verray force he rafte hir maydenheed; […]” — [c. 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by Skeat, The Wife of Bath's Tale (in Middle English):
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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