A Fertile Site

If I can't sleep, I most often think about patterns amongst words. For example, what are all the monosyllabic words that rhyme with "ush"? Last night, I was thinking about words that have "fusion" as their root. I came up with confusion, transfusion, effusion, diffusion, infusion but I decided to look at what a new site that I discovered yesterday had to say on the matter. As it turned out, a lot! The site is called English - Word Information. The information I was looking for was contained within eight pages with a heading as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The amount of detail contained on this topic is quite impressive. Let's look at the first two entries:

affuse (verb), affuses; affused; affusing

To pour upon; to sprinkle; such as when using a liquid.

affusion (uh FYOO zhuhn) (s) (noun), affusions (pl)

1. The pouring on of water or another liquid on a person's head, as in the rite of baptism: Lester's young son was having an affusion as a religious celebration that he is a Christian.

2. The pouring of a natural fluid on the body or any of its parts for therapeutic purposes: David was getting a cold affusion by a doctor in order to reduce the temperature of his fever and to calm his nervous condition.

Well, I wasn't aware that affuse and affusion were words and this blog's spell checker flags their presence as errors. Clearly, they are not in the spell checker's database and thus are relatively uncommon. 

One of the interesting features of the site is the use of cartoons to reinforce the meaning of certain words. For example, take the widely used word effusive for which there are three cartoons included. Figure 3 shows one of them:

Figure 3

In the eight pages referred to, there are interesting words to be discovered e.g. futilitarian. The word seems particularly apropos the current chaos that envelops the world.

futilitarian (s) (noun), futilitarians (pl)

A person who is convinced that human desires and actions can not be successfully accomplished. 

futilitarian (adjective), more futilitarian, most futilitarian

Referring to an opinion that human activities and desires are incapable of being achieved and so they are not worth attempting: So far one would think that it is a futilitarian idea that people all over the world can live together in peace. 

futilitarianism (s) (noun), futilitarianisms (pl)

The belief that human endeavors or efforts and aspirations are useless and can not be achieved.

There is an accompanying cartoon. See Figure 4.

Figure 4

So getting back to my "fusion" words, I discovered that in addition to confusion, transfusion, effusion, diffusion and infusion, there is:

• affusion
• autoinfusion
• circumfusion
• hydrodiffusion
• immunodiffusion
• interfusion
• oleoinfusion
• perfusion
• profusion
• refusion
• suffusion
• thermodiffusion
• vividiffussion

I'm familiar with profusion and suffusion but they hadn't sprung to mind earlier. Of course, some of the words are scientific or medical and not common. The spell checker flags circumfusion, oleofusion, thermodiffusion and vividiffusion.

I was led to the site initially by an investigation into words ending in INE that describe animals. A blog that I stumbled upon referred me to the site. There is a unit on words ending in INE, not exclusive to animals, and very informative. See Figure 5.

Figure 5

So overall this is very useful resource for those interested in the English language and those interested in expanding their vocabulary.