bitful

Marked by or possessing a high degree of sophistication; refined.

A woman regarded as scolding and vicious.

Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed. An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path.

A riotous disturbance; a noisy quarrel.

A quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew.

This is a picture of a dirty bowl. The worst kind of dirty bowl: day-old encrusted chocolate porridge made while waiting for the dishwasher service people to show up. You may click on the thumbnail to see the full size version of this picture of a very dirty bowl in all its mucky glory.
But the [...]

A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert

Precisely meaningful; forceful and brief: a pithy comment.

When I was little we had a dishwasher, but crockery had to be hand-rinsed before sticking it in, and then the machine made so much noise that as far as I can remember I only ever saw it used to hide a spare set of keys to my parents' shop.
When we moved into the new [...]

To win over by coaxing, flattery, or artful talk.

To anticipate and dispose of effectively; render unnecessary.

To avoid or neglect (a duty or responsibility).

To usurp the place of, especially through intrigue or underhanded tactics. To displace and substitute for (another).

A warning or caution. A qualification or explanation. A formal notice

Today is the six month anniversary of my switch to contracting. I signed up with an umbrella company that takes care of the administrative and tax issues entirely, for a monthly fee. It is more expensive that setting up my own limited company, but it made sense to me as I was not sure I [...]

Offensively flattering or insincere. Offensive to the taste or sensibilities.

So my mother calls me today.
I find a missed call from her (I had gone down to pick up our new Window Wizard that had just being delivered: oh the excitement - yes, we are that sad, but how else are we going to clean our 2m50 x 2m50 windows inside and out?) and I [...]

To drink heartily.

This book is not fun, and yet I enjoyed it immensely.
It deals with the ultimate taboo of a woman who does not feel any maternal instinct when her first born is placed into her arms, and the subsequent guilt as she raises a child with whom she develops an ambivalent relationship, and who as a [...]

The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.

If you do not fancy joining me in gazing at my belly button, nobody is forcing you, so please look away now and come back tomorrow.
Now, how is it possible to put on half a pound after dieting for a week?
It is if you cancel all efforts by reaching Sunday afternoon craving bread so much [...]

An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.

One who opposes technical or technological change.

An arbitrary order or decree. Authorization or sanction: government fiat.

Dr B. and I are looking for lunchtime ideas to expand our cooking repertoire, and are very keen to hear any suggestion you might have for us.
We are not too fussy about what we eat, but we have rather strict requirements concerning food preparation, storage and transport.
More precisely, we are looking for recipes that are

made [...]

Confused, rambling, or incoherent discourse; nonsense. A complicated, petty set of procedures.

I love words. Words make life sweeter.

I wish I knew every word. Unfortunately, I don't. I am told I do a pretty good job at using an extensive vocabulary for someone whose first language is not English, but I get extremely frustrated whenever I encounter a word I do not know.

So I usually make a note of it, then look it up - but very often forget what it means, unless I use it shortly afterwards. Sadly, with age this happens more and more often.

I recently noticed that I look up on average a word a day. That's when I thought I could put this website to good use and post them here.

A few points:

• some of the words you will see might look very ordinary to you. As I said, keep in mind that English is not my first language. Sometimes these are words I have never heard before, or everyday words I cannot get into my head;
• most of the definitions are taken from the Answers.com website. This is because I find the descriptions concise yet complete. They also have very nice semantic URLs that enable me to write handy scripts to code this section of the website;
• if you access bitful via an RSS feed reader, you will not see the Word of the Day. However, if you are interested, you can subscribe to the Word of the Day feed or bookmark the Word of the Day page;
• contrary to what the timestamp says, I do not get up in the middle of the night to publish. I'm a bit of a cheat: I do it all in advance and make it magically appear when I am in fact (most nights) sleeping.

I hope you enjoy flexing your vocabulary as much as I do.

The combined sensation of good conversation, good company, good times etc.: great fun.

I did not go to work yesterday. On the way in, I started dripping bucketfuls of sweat on my not very impressed fellow commuters, so I turned around and went back to bed.
I slept and sweated all day and I hope this time I finally got rid of the cold I came back from holidays [...]

If you've been following this weblog for a while, you will know that I have engaged in an ongoing quest for the perfect RSS feed aggregator.
When Attensa for Outlook 2.0 was released in beta, I thought that's what I wanted: have all my feeds delivered to my email inbox, filter them according to rules I [...]