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. Some name a thing precisely. Some are a whole idea in a few syllables. Roots matter because knowing where a word comes from is usually the fastest way to remember what it means.
19 words, and counting.
A
Lacking correspondence between two sides — in strategy, a contest where one side risks far less than the other stands to gain.
from a- (not) and symmetria, from syn (together) and metron (measure)
The bet was asymmetric: a quarter of engineering time on one side, the whole category on the other.
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.
D
Built on the dactyl, a metrical foot of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da).
from daktylos, finger — one long joint followed by two short ones, like the foot it names
"Higgledy-piggledy" is pure dactylic rhythm — two feet of DUM-da-da, which is why a whole light-verse form is built on it.
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.
Relating to meter in verse; more broadly, relating to measurement.
from metron, measure — through Latin metricus
The speech worked less for what it said than for its metrical pull — every line landed on the beat.
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.
Done by stealth, because it would not survive being done in the open.
from surripere, to snatch secretly — from sub (under) and rapere (to seize)
The dashboard got a surreptitious redesign the week before the board meeting.
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.
To fit identical shapes together with no gaps and no overlaps, the way tiles cover a floor.
from tessella, a small mosaic tile — diminutive of tessera, a square block
The hard part of the reorg was making the teams tessellate — every problem owned once, none owned twice.