recondite
adjective
ri-ˈkän-
Floyd Dell
Did you know?
Recondite is one of those underused but useful words that’s always a boon to one’s vocabulary. Though it describes something difficult to understand, there is nothing recondite about the word’s history. It dates to the early 1600s, when it was coined from the Latin word reconditus, the past participle of recondere, “to conceal.” (“Concealed” is also a meaning of recondite, albeit an obscure one today.) Remove the re- of recondite and you get something even more obscure: condite, an obsolete verb meaning both “to pickle or preserve” and “to embalm.” Add the prefix in- to that quirky charmer and we get incondite, which means “badly put together,” as in “incondite prose.” All three words have the Latin word condere at their root; that verb is translated variously as “to put or bring together” and “to put up or store”—as in, perhaps, some pickles or preserves.
Synonyms
Examples of recondite in a Sentence
Quanta Magazine, 1 Apr. 2024
But a few key paragraphs within the 88-page filing mention the exclusion and social shaming of non-iPhone users confined inside green chat bubbles, distinguishing this case from some of the more recondite explanations of tech market competition in recent years.
—Lauren Goode, WIRED, 24 Mar. 2024
There are familiar words describing nature particular to the U.S., like prairie, skunk, coyote and chipmunk, but also more recondite ones, like catawba (a species of grape and type of sparkling wine), catawampous (fierce, destructive) and cottondom (the region in which cotton is grown).
—Sarah Ogilvie, WSJ, 11 Nov. 2023
Other efforts required more recondite statistical analysis.
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2023
See all Example Sentences for recondite 
Dictionary Entries Near recondite
Cite this Entry
“Recondite.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recondite. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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recondite
adjective
ri-ˈkän-
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