n. (Elec.) The strength of a current of electricity carried by a conductor or generated by a machine, measured in ampères. [ Webster 1913 Suppl. ]

v. t. [ imp. & p. p. Asperated; p. pr. & vb. n. Asperating. ] [ L. asperatus, p. p. of asperare, fr. asper rough. ] To make rough or uneven. [ 1913 Webster ]

The asperated part of its surface. Boyle. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. The act of asperating; a making or becoming rough. Bailey. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ OF. attemprement. ] A tempering, or mixing in due proportion. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ Cf. OF. atemprance. ] Temperance; attemperament. [ Obs. ] Chaucer. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ L. attemperatus, p. p. of attemperare. See Attemper. ] Tempered; proportioned; properly adapted. [ 1913 Webster ]

Hope must be . . . attemperate to the promise. Hammond. [ 1913 Webster ]

v. t. To attemper. [ Archaic ] [ 1913 Webster ]

n. The act of attempering or regulating. [ Archaic ] Bacon. [ 1913 Webster ]

v. t. [ See Contemper. ] To temper; to moderate. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

Moisten and contemperate the air. Sir T. Browne. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. 1. The act of tempering or moderating. [ Obs. ] Sir T. Browne. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. Proportionate mixture or combination. “Contemperation of light and shade.” Boyle. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. The condition of being tempered; proportionate mixture; temperature. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

The different contemperature of the elements. South. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. 1. Work done by a cooper. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. The price paid for coopers' work. [ 1913 Webster ]

3. A place where coopers' work is done. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ Cf. F. coopérant. ] Operating together; as, cooperant forces. [ 1913 Webster ]

v. i. [ imp. & p. p. Cooperated; p. pr. & vb. n. Cooperating. ] [ L. cooperatus, p. p. of cooperari to cooperate; co + operari to work, opus work. See Operate. ] To act or operate jointly with another or others; to concur in action, effort, or effect. [ 1913 Webster ]

Whate'er cooperates to the common mirth. Crashaw. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ L. cooperatio: cf. F. coopération. ] 1. The act of cooperating, or of operating together to one end; joint operation; concurrent effort or labor. [ 1913 Webster ]

Not holpen by the cooperation of angels. Bacon. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. (Polit. Econ.) The association of a number of persons for their benefit. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. Operating jointly to the same end. [ 1913 Webster ]

Cooperative society, a society established on the principle of a joint-stock association, for the production of commodities, or their purchase and distribution for consumption, or for the borrowing and lending of capital among its members. --
Cooperative store, a store established by a cooperative society, where the members make their purchases and share in the profits or losses. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ L.: cf. F. coopérateur. ] One who labors jointly with others to promote the same end. “Cooperators with the truth.” Boyle. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ OE. coperose, F. couperose, fr. (assumed?) L. cuprirosa, equiv. to G. cha`lkanqos, i. e. copper flower, vitriol. See Copper and Rose. ] Green vitriol, or sulphate of iron; a green crystalline substance, of an astringent taste, used in making ink, in dyeing black, as a tonic in medicine, etc. It is made on a large scale by the oxidation of iron pyrites. Called also ferrous sulphate. [ 1913 Webster ]

☞ The term copperas was formerly synonymous with vitriol, and included the green, blue, and white vitriols, or the sulphates of iron, copper, and zinc. [ 1913 Webster ]

(Physics), A certain temperature, different for different gases, but always the same for each gas, regarded as the temperature above which no amount of pressure can produce condensation to a liquid; the temperature above which a gas cannot be liquified. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. (Bot.) Of, pertaining to, or resembling, a large family of plants of which the sedge is the type. [ 1913 Webster ]

v. t. & i. [ imp. & p. p. Depauperated p. pr. & vb. n. Depauperating ] [ LL. depauperatus, p. p. depauperare to impoverish; L. de- + pauperare to make poor, pauper poor. ] To make poor; to impoverish. [ 1913 Webster ]

Liming does not depauperate; the ground will last long, and bear large grain. Mortimer. [ 1913 Webster ]

Humility of mind which depauperates the spirit. Jer. Taylor. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ L. depauperatus, p. p. ] (Bot.) Falling short of the natural size, from being impoverished or starved. Gray. [ 1913 Webster ]

n.; pl. Desperadoes [ OSp. desperado, p. p. of desperar, fr. L. desperare. See Desperate. ] A reckless, furious man; a person urged by furious passions, and regardless of consequence; a wild ruffian. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ L. desperatus, p. p. of desperare. See Despair, and cf. Desperado. ] 1. Without hope; given to despair; hopeless. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

I am desperate of obtaining her. Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. Beyond hope; causing despair; extremely perilous; irretrievable; past cure, or, at least, extremely dangerous; as, a desperate disease; desperate fortune. [ 1913 Webster ]

3. Proceeding from, or suggested by, despair; without regard to danger or safety; reckless; furious; as, a desperate effort. “Desperate expedients.” Macaulay. [ 1913 Webster ]

4. Extreme, in a bad sense; outrageous; -- used to mark the extreme predominance of a bad quality. [ 1913 Webster ]

A desperate offendress against nature. Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

The most desperate of reprobates. Macaulay.

Syn. -- Hopeless; despairing; desponding; rash; headlong; precipitate; irretrievable; irrecoverable; forlorn; mad; furious; frantic. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. One desperate or hopeless. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

adv. In a desperate manner; without regard to danger or safety; recklessly; extremely; as, the troops fought desperately. [ 1913 Webster ]

She fell desperately in love with him. Addison. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. Desperation; virulence. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ L. desperatio: cf. OF. desperation. ] 1. The act of despairing or becoming desperate; a giving up of hope. [ 1913 Webster ]

This desperation of success chills all our industry. Hammond. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. A state of despair, or utter hopeless; abandonment of hope; extreme recklessness; reckless fury. [ 1913 Webster ]

In the desperation of the moment, the officers even tried to cut their way through with their swords. W. Irving. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. Distemperature. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ LL. distemperatus, p. p. ] 1. Immoderate. [ Obs. ] Sir W. Raleigh. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. Diseased; disordered. [ Obs. ] Wodroephe. [ 1913 Webster ]

adv. Unduly. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

n. 1. Bad temperature; intemperateness; excess of heat or cold, or of other qualities; as, the distemperature of the air. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

2. Disorder; confusion. Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

3. Disorder of body; slight illness; distemper. [ 1913 Webster ]

A huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life. Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

4. Perturbation of mind; mental uneasiness. [ 1913 Webster ]

Sprinkled a little patience on the heat of his distemperature. Sir W. Scott. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ F. espérance, fr. L. sperans, p. pr. of sperare to hope. ] Hope. [ Obs. ] Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. An artificial language, intended to be universal, devised by Dr. Zamenhof, a Pole, who adopted the pseudonym “Dr. Esperanto” in publishing his first pamphlet regarding it in 1887. The vocabulary is very largely based upon words common to the chief European languages, and sounds peculiar to any one language are eliminated. The spelling is phonetic, and the accent (stress) is always on the penult. A revised and simplified form, called Ido was developed in 1907, but Esperanto remained at the end of the 20th century the most popular artificial language designed for normal human linguistic communication. -- Es`pe*ran"tist n. [Webster 1913 Suppl. +PJC ]

Esperanto

By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 05/12/99

A surprising 2 million speakers worldwide get their words' worth from the 'planned language' created in the 19th century

People were thinking big in the late 19th century. They utopianized, they universalized, they created Zionism, the modern Olympics, the Socialist International.

Thinking big back then sometimes meant thinking weird. Inundate the planet with a dark bubbly syrup? Try Coca-Cola. Chew 80 times before swallowing your food? Fletcherism, as the practice was called, was once more popular than Coke. A universal language? Say “Esperanto.”

Unlike Coke, Esperanto has not conquered the world. Unlike Fletcherism, neither has it disappeared. In the late 20th century, it remains on the tip of surprisingly many tongues.

Esperanto? It's Greek to me: Esperanto was invented by Dr. Ludwig L. Zamenhof, an optometrist, in 1887. A Polish Jew, Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok, a city where Russian, Polish, German, and Yiddish were commonly spoken. Zamenhof had a knack for languages (he spoke eight, not counting Esperanto). He was also very much a product of his era. It occurred to him that if different peoples all spoke the same tongue, they might get along better. He decided to invent one - not a language to replace other languages, but one to supplement them, so that everyone, regardless of native tongue, might be able to communicate with one another.

Zamenhof began working on his project when he was 15 and spent 13 years perfecting it. He presented his new language in a book called “Dr. Esperanto's International Language.” “Esperanto” means “one who hopes.”

Esperanto derives its vocabulary from various European languages: Latin, Greek, and Romance and Germanic tongues. The grammar is regular and greatly simplified. The spelling is phonetic, and nouns have no genders. Its regularity and simplicity make it easy to learn.

“In the beginning”: “En la komenco Dio kreis la cielon kaj teron” is the Esperanto translation of the first 10 words from the King James Version of the Bible (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”).

First, there was Volapuk: Esperanto is neither the first nor only constructed language. The idea goes back at least to the 17th century and the philosopher Rene Descartes. It derived further intellectual credence from the Enlightenment belief in universal systems and the primacy of reason. However, it wasn't until the late 19th century that the first constructed languages appeared.

Volapuk, invented by a Catholic priest, the Rev. J. M. Schleyer, predates Esperanto by nearly a decade. It attracted several hundred thousand practitioners, but once the novelty wore off, Volapuk quickly lost out to Esperanto. Both languages eventually gave birth to “improved” versions, known, respectively, as Idiom Neutral and Ido (short for Esperandido), but neither really took hold.

Other invented languages include Solresol, based on the musical scale; Timerio, a numerical language; Glosa, an attempt to create an international language using as few words as possible; and Interlingua, which is derived from English and Romance languages.

Diego Marani, a translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels, has drawn considerable attention with his Europanto, a playful blend of English and various European languages (see sidebar).

Lights! Camera! Esperanto!: An Esperanto film canon exists, albeit consisting of only one title, “Incubus,” a 1965 fantasy/sci-fi feature starring a pre-“Star Trek” William Shatner. The “Incubus” Web site (http://www.incubusthefilm.com) makes noises about a forthcoming video release, but no dates are given.

What's so funny about peace, love, and Esperanto?: Elvis Costello commissioned Esperanto liner notes for his album “Blood and Chocolate.”

The East is Esperantist: There are an estimated 2 million Esperantists in the world, and they live in at least 86 countries.

Historically, the movement has been strongest in Central Europe. As Miko Sloper, director of the Esperanto League for North America (ELNA), points out, “You travel a hundred miles in any direction there and you might need to speak some other language to be understood. It's very practical to have a common language, and for obvious political reasons most people there certainly didn't want it to be Russian.”

Though the World Esperanto Association (UEA) is headquartered in Rotterdam, more than half the world's Esperanto speakers are now believed to live in China. The language's popularity there stems from a 40-part instructional series broadcast on Chinese television in the early '90s.
Large pockets of Esperantists also exist in Korea and Japan.

Truth, justice, and the Esperanto way: ELNA, the leading Esperanto organization in this country, is located in El Cerrito, Calif. The Bay Area is the closest thing America has to an Esperanto hotbed, thanks largely to San Francisco State University, whose annual Summer Esperanto Workshop celebrates its 30th anniversary in July.

Locally, the Esperanto Society of New England has about 50 members.

One hobbit, one orc, one elf, one dwarf - one language?: J. R. R. Tolkien, who taught philology at Oxford University when not writing “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” gave Esperanto his endorsement, sort of.
\
“My advice to all who have the time or inclination to concern themselves with the international language movement would be: `Back Esperanto loyally.'”

Friends in high places: At least six Nobel Prize winners have been Esperantists. So was Yugloslavia's postwar ruler Josip Broz Tito.

Esperanto? Ho, ho, ho: The language's image as a sort of verbal vegetarianism has meant that Esperanto often serves as a linguistic fall guy. Isaac Bashevis Singer once denounced modern Hebrew “as soulless Esperanto.” Fran Lebowitz writes in one of her humor pieces, “The writer is to the real world what Esperanto is to the language world - funny, maybe, but not that funny.”

You can judge a language by its enemies: Hitler derided Esperanto in “Mein Kampf.” Stalin labeled it “the language of spies.” US Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Esperantists of being communists.

You can judge a language by its literature: PEN, the international writers organization, has an Esperanto chapter. Some 30,000 titles have been published in the language. “People write novels in Esperanto,” says Humphrey Tonkin, professor of humanities at the University of Hartford and past president of the UEA. “There's quite a lot of poetry. As with any other language, there are good novels and bad novels, good poetry and bad poetry.”

Among authors translated into Esperanto are Dante, Tolstoy, Goethe, Ibsen, and Sartre.

Bill Gates does not speak Esperanto: Sun Microsystems originally advertised its Java computing system as “the Esperanto of computer languages.”

Then again, maybe he does: The number of Esperanto Web sites - for instance, there's http://esperanto.wunderground.com, which offers weather forecasts in Esperanto - would suggest the language has a disproportionately high following among the digerati. “It kind of makes intuitive sense, ” says Sloper, that people who use artificial languages on-screen would be intrigued by an artificial language in the rest of their lives (actually, Esperantists prefer the term “planned language”).

David Wolff, an Acton software engineer who's the president of ELNA, agrees. “Programmers are used to looking for solutions to things, looking for ways to fix problems, and looking especially for ways that are inexpensive and effective. Esperanto is that kind of a solution. You follow simple rules. It's easy to get into and to learn it, and it clearly solves a specific kind of problem.”

Waiting for the “fina venko”: “We're still a little club, in a way, and there's a camaraderie to that,” says Sloper.

“Esperantists speak of the `fina venko,' or `final victory.' The concept is that eventually every moderately educated person on the earth will know Esperanto enough to, say, be able to order a cup of coffee in it. Is that going to happen? I don't really care. It would be nice if everyone knew Esperanto, but already there are enough people who do so that we have a community.

“There are directories of Esperantists all over the world, and when someone is traveling to a foreign country it will frequently happen that an Esperantist will write or e-mail a fellow Esperantist and be invited to stay in his home. Does that happen with people who speak just English? I don't think so.”

Mark Feeney
[This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 05/12/99.
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.] (available at https://web.archive.org/web/20040604054103/http://www.esne.net/ligoj/boston_globe_article.htm) [PJC]

a. [ L. exasperatus, p. p. of exsasperare to roughen, exasperate; ex out (intens.) + asperare to make rough, asper rough. See Asperity. ] Exasperated; imbittered. [ Obs. ] Shak. [ 1913 Webster ]

Like swallows which the exasperate dying year
Sets spinning. Mrs. Browning. [ 1913 Webster ]

v. t. [ imp. & p. p. Exsasperated p. pr. & vb. n. Exasperating ] 1. To irritate in a high degree; to provoke; to enrage; to excite or to inflame the anger of; as, to exasperate a person or his feelings. [ 1913 Webster ]

To exsasperate them against the king of France. Addison. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. To make grievous, or more grievous or malignant; to aggravate; to imbitter; as, to exasperate enmity. [ 1913 Webster ]

To exasperate the ways of death. Sir T. Browne.

Syn. -- To irritate; provoke. See Irritate. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. One who exasperates or inflames anger, enmity, or violence. [ 1913 Webster ]

adj. 1. extremely annoying or displeasing.
Syn. -- annoying, infuriating, maddening, vexing. [ WordNet 1.5 ]

2. same as exacerbating.
Syn. -- aggravating, exacerbating. [ WordNet 1.5 ]

n. [ L. exasperatio: cf. F. exaspération. ] 1. The act of exasperating or the state of being exasperated; irritation; keen or bitter anger. [ 1913 Webster ]

Extorted from him by the exasperation of his spirits. South. [ 1913 Webster ]

2. Increase of violence or malignity; aggravation; exacerbation. “Exasperation of the fits.” Sir H. Wotton. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ L. exuperabilis, exsuperabilis. See Exuperate. ] Surmountable; superable. [ Obs. ] Johnson. [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ L. exuperantia, exsuperantia. ] Superiority; superfluity. [ Obs. ] Sir K. Digby. [ 1913 Webster ]

a. [ L. exuperans, exsuperans, p. pr. ] Surpassing; exceeding; surmounting. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

v. t. [ L. exuperatus, exsuperatus, p. p. of exuperare, exsuperare to excel; ex out + superare to go over, super above, over. ] To excel; to surmount. [ Obs. ] [ 1913 Webster ]

n. [ See Exurgent. ] The act of rising or coming into view. [ Obs. ] Baxter. [ 1913 Webster ]

adj. 1. requiring hand manipulation for operation; not automatic or machine-driven; as, a hand-operated winch. Opposite of automatic or powered.
Syn. -- non-automatic. [ WordNet 1.5 ]

a. Exhibiting hyperactivity. [ PJC ]

n. An unusually high level of activity; -- used especially with respect to children who move around frequently and do not sit still very long, most noticeably in school. It is sometimes associated with attention deficit disorder. [ PJC ]

‖n. [ NL., fr. Gr. "ype`r over + a"i^ma blood. ] (Med.) A superabundance or congestion of blood in an organ or part of the body. [ 1913 Webster ]

Active hyperæmia, congestion due to increased flow of blood to a part. --
Passive hyperæmia, interchange due to obstruction in the return of blood from a part.

-- Hy`per*æ"mic a. [1913 Webster]

‖n. [ NL., fr. Gr. "ype`r over + &unr_; sense, perception.] (Med. & Physiol.) A state of exalted or morbidly increased sensibility of the body, or of a part of it. -- Hy`per*æs*thet"ic a. [ 1913 Webster ]

‖n.; pl. Hyperapophyses [ NL. See Hyper-, and Apophysis. ] (Anat.) A lateral and backward-projecting process on the dorsal side of a vertebra. -- Hy`per*ap`o*phys"i*al a. [1913 Webster]