parenthesis
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /pəˈɹɛnθəsɪs/
Forms: form: parentheses
Etymology: Learned borrowing from Late Latin parenthesis (“addition of a letter to a syllable in a word”), itself borrowed from Ancient Greek παρένθεσις (parénthesis, “insertion”).
Senses: examples: text: How expressive this little parenthesis: "Sakuntalâ makes a chiding gesture with her finger"!
ref: 1903, Karl Mantzius, A History of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times, page 86:
synonyms: word: parentheme
english: academic usage
translation: academic usage
glosses: A clause, phrase or word which is inserted (usually for explanation or amplification) into a passage which is already grammatically complete, and usually marked off with brackets, commas or dashes.
examples: text: There be five manner of points and divisions most used among cunning men; the which if they be well used, make the sentence very light and easy to be understood, both to the reader and hearer: and they be these, virgil,—come,—parenthesis,—plain point,—interrogative[…] it is a slender stroke leaning forward, betokening a little short rest, without any perfectness yet of sentence.
ref: 1824, John Johnson, Typographia, Or the Printer's Instructor, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green:
text: Whoever introduced the several points, it seems that a full-point, a point called come, answering to our colon-point, a point called virgil answering to our comma-point, the parenthesis-points and interrogative-point, were used at the close of the fourteenth, or beginning of the fifteenth century.
ref: 1842, F. Francillon, An Essay on Punctuation, page 9:
text: [T]he present research also made an effort to approach a greater accuracy in presenting the original sources of borrowed words. This was achieved by presenting etymons from Hindustani in the Devanagari script followed by a transliteration in the Roman alphabet in parentheses.
ref: 2018, James Lambert, “Anglo-Indian slang in dictionaries on historical principles”, in World Englishes, volume 37, page 255:
glosses: Either of a pair of brackets, especially (mainly US) round brackets, ( and ) (used to enclose parenthetical material in a text).
examples: text: Mr. Trevanion was one of those talkers, who are too much engrossed with their own subject matter to have much attention to bestow elsewhere; with them silence is attention. Ethel's wandering eye, and lip, tremulous with its effort to speak, would never have attracted his notice. To his utter astonishment, she interrupted a parenthesis, as brilliant as the rocket which it depicted, by saying,—
"Mr. Trevanion, I do not know what you will think of my boldness, but I must speak to you."
ref: 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XV, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 113:
text: Ryan Bingham (George Clooney): I thought I was a part of your life.
Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga): I thought we signed up for the same thing[…] I thought our relationship was perfectly clear. You are an escape. You're a break from our normal lives. You're a parenthesis.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney): I'm a parenthesis?
ref: 2009, Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air:
glosses: A digression; the use of such digressions.
topics: human-sciences
logic
mathematics
philosophy
sciences
glosses: Such brackets as used to clarify expressions by grouping those terms affected by a common operator, or to enclose the components of a vector or the elements of a matrix.
Synonyms: sense: (can be a) parenthetical expression
word: parathesis
sense: (can be a) parenthetical expression
word: apposition
sense: brackets
word: round bracket
sense: brackets
word: parenthesis-point
english: round bracket; for the meaning
translation: round bracket; for the meaning
word: paren
Derived terms: parenthesome
Related terms: parenthesis-point
parenthetic
parenthetical
parenthesise
parenthesize
triple parentheses
parentheme