When you come across a word like eleemosynary, it's time to whip out the binoculars and step into the waders. Reading has become word watching, where, as in bird watching, rarity is the thrill.
And thrilled we were when investment adviser and author William J. Bernstein called his new investment guide, "If You Can,” "entirely eleemosynary." This phrase got the attention even of The New York Times, no stranger to A+ words. Quoting Bernstein's description, the paper felt obliged to follow eleemosynary with the parenthetical, "a charitable offering, if you don’t feel like running to your dictionary," addressing the many of us who have no idea what eleemosynary means (or that it is even a word).
Eleemosynary is a word, and it is indeed used to describe charitable offerings. As our blurb on the eleemosynary page in our Dictionary explains, eleemosynary "comes from the Latin word eleemosyna, which means alms, the historic term for money or food given to the poor." The blurb goes on:
You can use the word eleemosynary today when you mean pertaining to or dependent on charitable giving. If you say, "Eleemosynary contributions commence with one's own domicile," then you've found a verbose way to say, "Charity begins at home."
So how rare is eleemosynary exactly? Our dictionary page says you can expect to see eleemosynary on every 30,680th page of text you read. To put that in perspective, you can expect to see curmudgeon every 17,936th page, stimulus every 598th and nice every 123rd.
Which means eleemosynary is rare. A sighting is one for the ages...akin to getting a look at the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Are you shivering?