vestige means A mark left on the earth by a foot. It carries an Arena rating of 1934, earned across 14 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, vestige ranks #51 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #71 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #135 of 42,747 for Qualifying, #1,177 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
vestige is pronounced /ˈvɛs.tɪd͡ʒ/.
Why “vestige” is a great word
A visible trace, mark, or remnant of something now lost, absent, or ceased to exist. From French vestige, from Latin vestīgium ("footstep, footprint, track, trace"), first attested in English c. 1600. Unlike a relic, which is a tangible survivor to be venerated, or a residue, which is a material leftover, a vestige is the fainter, more elegiac mark of absence itself. It is the weathered groove in a stone stair from generations of hands, the useless wing bones of a flightless bird, or the indentation in a pillow where a head once rested—not an object, but an echo; not the thing itself, but its last whisper on the skin of the present.
Etymology
From French vestige, from Latin vestīgium (“footstep, footprint, track, the sole of the foot, a trace, mark”). Doublet of vestigium.
noun
- A mark left on the earth by a foot.
- A faint mark or visible sign left by something which is lost, or has perished, or is no longer present.e.g.“the vestiges of ancient magnificence in Palmyra”
- A vestigial organ; a non-functional organ or body part that was once functional in an evolutionary ancestor.e.g.“Any person seeing such a condition could not help being frightened at the conditions found, and it seems to me that that fact should lead us to think that the appendix is a vestige or becoming so.” — 1904, Transactions of the […] annual session, volume 40, Homeopathic Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania, page 160:
- The remaining portion of a partially suppressed sideband.e.g.“[J]ust a trace, or vestige, of the other sideband is included. In the receiver detection circuitry the vestige of the lower sideband is added to the upper sideband.” — 2003, Tarmo Anttalainen, Introduction to Telecommunications Network Engineering, page 133:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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