prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (words are sexy)
[personal profile] prettygoodword
septemplicate - n., one of seven (exact) copies.


Of, for ex, a document. This was a bigger deal before photocopiers, when there was a suite of numerical copies: duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate, quintuplicate, sextuplicate, septemplicate, and so on. Curiously, the OED stops the series there, though for ex Chambers' dictionary does include octuplicate. Septem is, of course, the combining form for the Latin word for seven -- September having been, in the Roman calendar, the seventh month.

---L.

Date: 2014-05-16 02:35 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com
And here I thought it was going to mean to implicate September.

Date: 2014-05-16 04:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prettygoodword.livejournal.com
I try to stay away from seasonal scandals.

---L.

Date: 2014-06-22 04:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] flwyd.livejournal.com
Interesting; it's not in the Google ngrams corpus with sextuplicate and octuplicate only turning up one result each. Perhaps it was more common in contexts that didn't make it into books.

As one might expect, triplicate through quintuplicate had their heyday in around 1920 and 1940, though the recurrence in the late '70s and '80s is interesting.

Date: 2014-06-23 02:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prettygoodword.livejournal.com
Or that in books/articles that haven't been scanned yet. Either way, sweet data there. Thanks!

---L.

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