Weekly Word: Obnubilate

If you know your Latin roots, you’ll know exactly what this one means. To obnubilate is “to obscure” or “cloud over”.

World Wide Words explains that obnubilate is a rare word today, but it had its uses:

Nineteenth-century reviewers used it to suggest that a writer had been less than transparently clear in his exposition, as here in a squib in The Princeton review in 1832 about a book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “There is here fine criticism, classic wit, poetic dreaming, and some grains of sound doctrine, but so obnubilated with the fumes of German metaphysics, that we become giddy, and lose all power of comprehension”.

It’s often used in a figurative sense, but Merriam-Webster explains that it comes from the Latin words ob-, “in the way”, and nubes, meaning “cloud”. So the word obnubilate literally means something like “to cover up with clouds” or “to put clouds in the way”.

The English word cloud sounds nothing like nubes, because cloud comes from the Old English word clud, meaning a “mass of rock” (OED). I don’t see how soft, floating puffs of water vapor resemble rocks in any way, but there you have it.