![]() So, by the time Huxley’s novel was published, the vomitorium had already been inscribed in popular imagination as a room used for vomiting during a Roman dinner party so that the participants would be able to carry on eating.īut where were all those references inspired from? Stories of Roman orgies with the participants throwing up during the meal are described in Roman courtier Petronius’ Satyricon, from the 1st century AD, but no specific room is designated for the act. Two articles in the Los Angeles Times, in 19, refer to the vomitorium once more with the same meaning. In 1871, two references are made to the vomitorium as a room adjacent to the dining room, one by French journalist and politican Felix Pyat, describing a holiday meal and comparing it to a Roman orgy, and one by English writer Augustus Hare, in his publication Walks in Rome. So, how did the word come to be associated with a room used for vomiting during a Roman orgy? A misuse of the word appears in 1929, in Aldous Huxley’s novel Antic Hay, although earlier relevant references have been made in newspaper and journals, not being clear, however, as to whether the vomitorium was a passageway or a room. Archaeologists today use the words vomitorium/vomitoria as architectural terms, to describe the passageway or corridor of an amphitheatre connecting the bank seats with an outside space. The word, part of the Latin word group referring to vomiting, fist appeared in the 5th century AD in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, who used the plural to refer to passages that caused spectators to “spew forth” into their seats at public entertainment events. However, no ancient source actually uses the word for this purpose. ![]() ![]() To learn more, see the privacy policy.The word vomitorium has been often used to describe a room, adjacent to the dining room where a Roman dinner would take place, where participants would relieve themselves from a full stomach and carry on with the feast. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, WordNet, and note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource. In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. ![]() I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter. It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple.
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