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chirography

 
Dictionary: chi·rog·ra·phy   (kī-rŏg'rə-fē) pronunciation

n.
Penmanship.

chirographer chi·rog'ra·pher n.
chirographic chi'ro·graph'ic ('rə-grăf'ĭk) or chi'ro·graph'i·cal adj.

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Wordsmith Words: Chirography
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(ky-ROG-ruh-fee)

noun
Back in the Jurassic era, when there were no laptops and no text-messaging, people used a little thing called a pen to write on a flat surface known as paper. Chirography is a word from those times. It means handwriting or penmanship, also known as calligraphy.
My daughter says, "Why didn't they just download new fonts to their pens?" Well, we did once have fountain pens.
We can thank the Greeks again for the combining forms chiro- (hand) and -graphy (writing). The word has many cousins:
chiromancy: reading palms to divine the future: palmistry chiropractic: adjusting the spine (using hands, presumably) chiropody: an odd name for podiatry (treating foot problems) chiropter: another name for bats (who got their hands retrofitted as wings at Intelligent Design, Inc.)

Usage
"This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present." — Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Scarlet Letter; 1850.


 
 
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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