Good day to you, fellow logophiles! And welcome to today’s installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents! I hope you’re hungry - hungry for knowledge! - because today’s word is: jentacular.

Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘jentacular? Isn’t that just a word for someone named Jen who is spectacular?’ But sadly, you would be mistaken. Jentacular is an adjective meaning ‘of or pertaining to a breakfast taken early in the morning, or immediately on getting up.’ You would perhaps say, ‘Give me a moment, Lucy, I’m still fixing your jentacular coffee.’ One can also use the prefixes ‘pre’ and ‘post’ to denote before or after breakfast. For example, ‘I can’t talk right now, Mary, I need to take my post-jentacular shower.’ The word ‘antejacular’ refers specifically to something occuring before breakfast, such as ‘an antejacular jog’.

Jentacular comes from the Latin ‘ientaculum’ which means ‘a breakfast taken immediately on getting up’. The word peaked in use in 1836, with a small resurgence in 1900. Today, jentacular is used rarely, however, a related word, ‘prandial’, means ‘pertaining to a meal, especially dinner’, and can be used with ‘pre’ or ‘post’ as well. You could say, ‘Sit down at the table, Benny, we need to have a prandial conversation.’ Prandial comes from the Latin ‘prandium’ meaning meal, and came into prominent use in the 19th century. In turn, prandium came from the Greek ‘pro’, meaning ‘before’ and ‘endios’ meaning midday. Prandial is still used in the medical world, where ‘prandial pain’ refers to pain felt whilst eating. Similarly, prandial insulin is insulin given in the attempt to mimic the response of endogenous insulin to food intake.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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