verboten means (Strictly) forbidden or prohibited. It carries an Arena rating of 1379, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, verboten ranks #4,196 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #4,291 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,508 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #5,035 of 17,131 for Scariest Words.
verboten is pronounced /ˌvəˈbəʊtn̩/.
Why “verboten” is a great word
Strictly forbidden or prohibited, especially by an authoritative decree. Unadapted borrowing from German verboten, the past participle of verbieten (“to forbid”), from Old High German farbiotan (“to forbid”). Cognate with English forbid. First attested in English in 1912. Unlike “forbidden,” which covers any disallowance, or “proscribed,” which suggests formal condemnation, “verboten” carries the weight of absolute, authoritarian finality. It is the padlock on the factory gate, the black-bar redaction across a document, the uniformed guard turning you away—the imposition of order so complete it extinguishes possibility itself, a door closing that will not open again.
Etymology
Unadapted borrowing from German verboten (“banned, forbidden, prohibited”). Doublet of forbidden.
adj
- (Strictly) forbidden or prohibited.e.g.“Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).” — 2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual paranoia strikes academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington, D.C.: Chronicle of Higher Education Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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