Absurd

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /əbˈsɜːd/

Definitions

1. Something that is completely unreasonable, illogical, or ridiculous to the point of being laughable
2. completely illogical and ridiculous to the extent of defying reason or common sense
3. so unreasonable and nonsensical as to be obviously foolish or worthy of mockery

Etymology: The original sense of this word was musical. Latin "absurdus" meant "out of tune" or "dissonant," built from "ab," meaning "away from," and "surdus," meaning "deaf, silent, or dull-sounding." A discord was, quite literally, a sound that had wandered away from harmony, and the Romans applied the same picture to anything that failed to fit together. The word passed into Middle French as "absurde," and English took it in 1557, when it still carried the sense of something clashing or incongruous rather than something ridiculous. The shift toward mockery came later, as "absurd" came to describe claims and behaviour that offended reason so plainly that they invited laughter. The root "surdus" also gave English "surd," a term in mathematics for a quantity, such as the square root of two, that cannot be expressed as a simple ratio. Both words share the old idea of something that will not sound right, or cannot be spoken plainly.

Synonyms: ridiculous, preposterous, ludicrous, irrational, nonsensical

Antonyms: reasonable, logical, sensible, rational