Word of the Day:
nonplussed
What It Means
Unsure how to act or respond; bewildered, perplexed.
Nonplussed in Context
“And while many of us might be a little taken aback if Mom showed up at our offices, Secrist is utterly nonplussed, even happy about it.”
Did You Know?
From nonplus (“state of bewilderment or perplexity”, noun) or nonplus (“to bewilder or perplex (someone)”, verb) + -ed (suffix forming adjectives, and the past tense and past participle forms of verbs). Nonplus (noun) is derived from Latin nōn plūs (“no further, no more”), from nōn (“not”) + plūs (“additionally, more; further”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁- (“to fill”)). The etymological sense is similar to being left speechless as a result of confusion: the nonplussed person can say or do “no more”. Adjective sense 2 (“unaffected”) is probably from a misinterpretation of the first element of the word as the prefix non- meaning “not”.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: nonplussed (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “nonplussed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nonplussed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
