Tidy Lookup
All sites11
Curious Word of the Daycuriouswordoftheday.com

voluptuary

noun /vəˈlʌptʃʊəɹi/

  1. One whose life is devoted to sensual appetites; a pleasure-seeker, a sensualist.

    But Mrs. Cole, in oppoſition to this, aſſured me that the gentlemen I ſhould be preſented to, were, by their rank and taſte of things, infinitely ſuperior to the being touch'd with any glare of dreſs, or ornaments, ſuch as ſilly women rather confound, and overlay, than ſet off their beauty with; that theſe veteran voluptuaries knew better than not to hold them in the higheſt contempt, […]

Where it comes from

From French voluptuaire, or directly from its etymon Late Latin voluptuārius, from Latin voluptārius (“pleasure-seeker; agreeable, delightful, pleasant; sensual”), from voluptās (“delight, pleasure, satisfaction”) + -ārius (suffix forming adjectives from nouns). Voluptās is derived from volup (“with pleasure; agreeably, pleasantly, satisfactorily”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *welh₁- (“to choose; to want”)) + -tās (suffix forming feminine abstract nouns indicating a state of being).

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry voluptuary (CC BY-SA 4.0).

← voluntellvolutation →

Another random word More words starting with V