A mixture or blend, especially one in which the parts stay distinguishable.
from al-malgham, an emollient — through Medieval Latin amalgama
The team was an amalgam of researchers, designers, and one very patient lawyer.
I love these words. They do something no other word does. In some cases they name a thing precisely, or carry a whole idea in three syllables. Each one here comes with its root, because knowing where a word has been is usually the fastest way to remember what it means.
14 words, and counting.
A
C
Clear, logical, and convincing — an argument that compels rather than merely persuades.
from cogere, to compel — from co- (together) and agere (to drive)
She made the most cogent case for killing the project, which is why it got killed.
The alignment of a telescope's optics so that light comes to its truest focus.
from collimare — a scribe's misreading of collineare, to align straight, that stuck
The mirror was flawless; the blur was collimation, and it took ten minutes to fix.
E
Originating outside the system in question.
from exo (outside) and -genes (born)
Churn looked like a product failure until we traced it to an exogenous shock in their industry.
I
To attribute something — usually something unwelcome — to a person or cause.
from imputare, to reckon or charge to an account
It's easy to impute malice to a decision that was mostly just someone in a hurry.
Identical in structure — different things whose parts relate in exactly the same way.
from isos (equal) and morphe (form)
The org chart and the architecture diagram were isomorphic, and neither one was an accident.
M
Awareness and understanding of your own thought processes.
from meta (beyond) joined to Latin cognitio, knowing
The interview tested metacognition more than knowledge: not what he knew, but how he knew it.
O
Blocked, obstructed, or closed — hidden from view or from flow.
from occludere, to shut up or close off
The root cause sat there the whole time, occluded by a dashboard nobody questioned.
P
Plain and unromantic; lacking any poetry.
from prosa, straightforward discourse — prose, as opposed to verse
The explanation was prosaic and correct: someone had unplugged it.
Q
Daily; ordinary to the point of being invisible.
from quotidie, every day
The quotidian details — who runs the meeting, who writes it down — decide more than the strategy does.
S
Most noticeable or important.
from salire, to leap — a salient detail leaps out at you
Strip out the salient facts and the memo goes from nine pages to one.
Not religious. In finance and science, unfolding across a very long span of time.
from saeculum, an age or generation
It wasn't a cyclical dip, it was a secular decline, and we planned for the wrong one.
To overcome an obstacle — or simply to sit on top of something.
from Old French surmonter, to rise above
There was no clever way around it; the constraint had to be surmounted the slow way.
T
Relating to time, or to worldly affairs as opposed to spiritual ones.
from tempus, time
The bug was temporal — it only reproduced when two clocks disagreed by more than a second.