History

|məˈkäbrə, -ˈkäb|

adjective

disturbing and horrifying because of involvement with or depiction of death and injury: a macabre series of murders.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French macabre, from Danse Macabre ‘dance of death,’ from Old French, perhapsfrom Macabé ‘a Maccabee,’ with reference to a miracle play depicting the slaughter of the Maccabees.

1 a macabre ritual: gruesome, grisly, grim, gory, morbid, ghastly, unearthly, grotesque, hideous, horrific, shocking,dreadful, loathsome, repugnant, repulsive, sickening.

2 a macabre joke: black, weird, unhealthy; informal sick.

precocious |priˈkōSHəs|adjective(of a child) having developed certain abilities or proclivities at an earlier age than usual: he was a precocious, solitary boy.• (of behavior or ability) indicative of early development: a precocious talent for computing.• (of a plant) flowering or fruiting earlier than usual.DERIVATIVESprecociously adverb.precociousness noun.precocity |priˈkäsətē| nounORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin praecox, praecoc- (from praecoquere ‘ripen fully,’ from prae ‘before’ +coquere ‘to cook’) + -ious.

some of the boys were extremely precocious: advanced for one's age, forward, mature, gifted, talented, clever, intelligent,quick; informal smart. ANTONYMS backward.

618-907

At it's height in 750, the most powerful, most advanced, and best administered empire in the world. 4 million square miles of territory.

|ˈhe(ə)rəm, ˈhar-|

noun

1 the separate part of a Muslim household reserved for wives, concubines, and female servants.

• 2 the wives (or concubines) of a polygamous man.
• • a group of female animals sharing a single mate.

• "the pop star and his harem"
• "the inner rooms of the harem"

seraglio; zenana; women's quarters.

ORIGIN mid 17th cent. ( sense 1): from Arabic ḥaram, ḥarīm, literally ‘prohibited, prohibited place’ (hence‘sanctuary, women's quarters, women’), from ḥarama ‘be prohibited.’

• |ˈstôrēd| adjective literary
• celebrated in or associated with stories or legends: the island's storied past.

"Atget has rightly been considered first and foremost a photographer of Paris and its environs, but many of his earliest images were made in the Somme, a storied agrarian region in northern France, where Atget lived in the late 1880s."

the quarterback's storied career.

legendary, fabled, celebrated, of repute.

|mōˈtēf| noun:

• a decorative design or pattern: T-shirts featuring spiral motifs.
•   • a distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition: the nautical motif of his latest novel.
•   • Music a short succession of notes producing a single impression; a brief melodic or rhythmic formula out of whichlonger passages are developed: the motif in the second violin is submerged by the first violin's countermelody.
•   • an ornament of lace, braid, etc., sewn separately on a garment.
•   • Biochemistry a distinctive sequence on a protein or DNA, having a three-dimensional structure that allows binding interactions to occur.

"Atget's early photographic efforts were made specifically to serve artists, and photographic images of rural motifs were in high demand."

• 1 a colorful tulip motif: design, pattern, decoration, figure, shape, device, emblem, ornament.2 a recurring motif in her work: theme, idea, concept, subject, topic, leitmotif, element; through line.
• ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French.