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Comment by cybert00th | Hacker News Reader

Pulchritude!? Boy, I had to look that one up!

I know the word but never use it myself, even among people that I know know it, because it sounds ugly. It’s the first syllable that does it.

Looking it up, I still have no idea what it means. The best I can gather is its beautifully wholesome. Other sources say beauty, but it seems like such a specific word for a form of beauty.

It means physical beauty, like an attractive appearance.

Weird, I'd've guessed the opposite - the word looks as though it could've been related to "putrid".

Understandable. The meaning is easy to grasp intuitively if you've studied Latin for a semester or two and happen to know the word "pulchra." If not, I'm having trouble thinking of any cognates in English that are in any kind of common parlance.

Have never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their peers?

Alliteration. They wrote "paragon of pulchritude", which to me sounds like smart, dry humor. It works.

Precisely. The phrase is pretty popular in prose, particularly when prefixed with 'perfect'.

It could just be that the developer’s native language happens to be English, reads books, and he/she used a familiar word without thinking twice about it. Because this is, in fact, a fairly common word.

I’ve read at least several hundred books in English, and probably hundreds of thousands of news stories and blog posts, and don’t recall encountering it before. It seems to appear mostly in searches for its definition and gre prep...

Try, say, Google ngram. Would you say that, for example, “disharmonious” is a rare word? Graph them together. Pulchritude is not even moderately rare.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here; pulchritude twice as rare as disharmonious, which is relatively rare. It’s an order of magnitude rarer than effervescent, as an example, which is a word I would consider uncommon but in most people’s vocabularies. And given how much more common pulchritude is - surely physical beauty is one of the most common subjects in any language - while disharmony and effervescence are more complex and rarer in practice, I think it speaks to how little the word is used. Its synonym, beauty, is used 2000x as often.

Except that pulchritude beats disharmonious for over a hundred years. And even now, it’s half as common as disharmonious, which is a commonplace word. But if you think that a word like “disharmonious” is in any sense rare, then I don’t think I can convince you with data.

When compared to "harmony" usage of the other words is basically zero. Harmony is a common word, and it is the root which makes "disharmonious" easy to understand despite its extreme rarity.

Even "disharmony" is far more common than "disharmonious."

Disharmonious just seems common because it sounds similar to a word we're familiar with. Most times I can recall, a writer would craft a sentence using the word 'disharmony' instead, which is many times more common than either. What led you to pick disharmonious as a comparison point, anyway?

I agree. I think if you're going to use "disharmonious" as your benchmark, you should be comparing it with "pulchritudinous" instead.

Probably learned it while prepping for their SATs

If you search for the exact phrase you'd see it is fairly commonplace in literature.

It's not common at all.

It is a pretty rare word to come across in modern writing.

"And a sea of pulchritudinous models would have served as a lesson on how not to choose words: the ugly pulchritude sounds like the opposite of what it means, and it is one of those words that no one ever uses unless they are trying to show off.” https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/40167209-the-sense-of-...

A Redditer notes that a similar word is common in Spanish. For speakers of Latin-derived languages (French, Spanish, and of course Italian), English vocabulary quizzes are generally a bit more easy because English took its literary words from old French and Latin. Thanks William The Conqueror for that.

That said, as a french speaker I would have had no idea what this word means if I did not took Latin in high-school.

Yes, it comes directly from the latin pulchritudo which my dictionary gives as "beauty, excellence" and which is quite common in Latin texts.

To me, pulchritude is such an ugly sounding word I can always remember the meaning as being the opposite of how it sounds.

(Funny enough, I was just looking up to see if there is a name for words that sound opposite to their meaning and found this [0] discussion on the English stack exchange, which gives pulchritude as its example!)

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103741/name-for-...

"Pulcritud" and "pulcro" are not everyday words in Spanish, but pretty frequent. Mostly used to describe something that has been cared for and set up in a deliberately clean and orderly way.

A guy with an unshaven face, wild hair, casual or wrinkled clothes, etc would never be described as "pulcro", even if they otherwise look very handsome, beautiful, or attractive.

Same here... who would have thought reading random ancient source code comments could expand your vocabulary?

I learned this word (actually, it was pulchritudinous) from the DOS game Hyperspeed last year when I streamed a blind playthrough of it. To date, this is only the second usage I have ever seen of it.

Gonna take a gander and guess the developer might have an Indian origin! Or at least studied for the GRE!

"pulcher" is a fairly elementary piece of Latin vocab. It's in Book I of the Cambridge Latin Course, for example. This is much the same in other courses. So anyone, Indian or not, who has done basic Latin in school is likely to have encountered it and hence be aware of "pulchritude".

* https://www.dl.cambridgescp.com/dl_course/book-i

A random other example: https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/221512-gcse-latin-j282-defined...

Or anyone fluent on a romance language [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

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