Sir Winston Churchill is remembered as the leader of Great Britain during World War II, but he is also honored as an orator and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Quotations from the writer and historian appear at more than a hundred entries in the Unabridged. We put together a list of our favorites.
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backbite verb
"had all backbitten and double-crossed each other while pretending to work together"
discord noun
"must we fall into the jabber and babel of discord while victory is still unattained?"
expatiation noun
"it is a very risky thing to ask a professional soldier . . . to give a weekly expatiation on the war"
guttersnipe noun
"now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter"
harangue noun
"listening to his capacious harangue and its immaculate delivery"
lend-lease noun
"lend-lease . . . will stand forth as the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country"
meticulous adjective
"had observed a meticulous neutrality"
misname verb
("to call by a bad name")
"let none, therefore, in our country and Commonwealth or in the outside world misname or traduce our motives"
onward adjective
"the difficult and dangerous onward path which we must tread"
percolate verb
"soldiers and political police had already percolated into Bulgaria"
persevere verb
"I do not intend to take that cowardly course, but, on the contrary, to stand to my post and persevere in accordance with my duty as I see it"
prescience noun
"foresaw the great dangers . . . with far more prescience than most well-informed people"
pulsate verb
"great effort pulsating from the heart of this small island"
ridiculous adjective
"here surely is the world's record in the domain of the ridiculous and the contemptible"
simulacrum noun
"moved silently away in the night, . . . leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks, where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack"
unseasonably adverb
"tributes to German generosity fall unseasonably at this moment on French ears"
utensil noun
"a lackey and serf, the merest utensil of his master's will"
vulgar adjective
"no vulgar ambition, no morbid lust for material gain at the expense of others, had led us to the field"
wicket noun — on a bad wicket ("in a weak or unfavorable position")
"forced to fight a by-election on a bad wicket"
