superannuated
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˌsupɚˈænjuˌeɪtɪd/
Forms: form: more superannuated
form: most superannuated
Etymology: From the Latin superannuatus (“more than one year old”), from super (“over”) (English super-) + annus (“year”) (English annual).
Senses: examples: text: In Europe it’s too dreary—the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects.
ref: 1886 [1882], Henry James, The Point of View, London: Macmillan and Co.:
text: The above, appearing in a publication now long ago superannuated and forgotten, is all that hitherto has stood in human record to attest what manner of men respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd.
ref: 1888–1891, Herman Melville, “[Billy Budd, Foretopman.] Chapter XXV.”, in Billy Budd and Other Stories, London: John Lehmann, published 1951, →OCLC:
text: Your correspondent has a handful of superannuated computers lying around the home. The sprightliest of the bunch—a 400-megahertz Pentium II that came loaded with Windows NT4.0—has found a new lease on life as a Linux server.
ref: 2007 June 1, “Sledgehammers and hard drives”, in The Economist:
text: To call the sexual politics of Ladette to Lady old-fashioned is an understatement. It's a horrifying revival of superannuated attitudes about women dressed up as an educational excursion into young womanhood that exploits its subjects by loading them up on alcohol when the cameras are rolling.
ref: 2009 March 24, Larissa Dubecki, “Critic's view”, in The Age:
text: Files written fifteen or twenty years ago on superannuated computers and obsolete operating systems are for practical purposes irretrievable.
ref: 2010, Bruce Rich, To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India, Beacon Press, published 2010, →ISBN:
text: The 158 was a delicate and not especially sure-handling device, but by now its engine had been modified to produce 250 horsepower, which gave it a decisive speed advantage over the superannuated old clunkers that were predominately arranged against it.
ref: 2010, Stuart Mann, Gordon Murray, Art of the Formula 1 Race Car, Motorbooks, published 2010, →ISBN, page 14:
text: Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.
ref: 2014 November 6, Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’”, in New York Times:
synonyms: word: archaic
word: dated
word: out of date
word: outdated
word: outmoded
word: anachronistic
word: antediluvial
word: antediluvian
word: antiquated
word: antique
word: archaic
word: backward
word: backwards
word: behind the times
word: cobwebbed
word: cobwebby
word: dated
word: defunct
word: discontinued
word: disused
word: dootsie
word: elderly
word: extinct
word: expired
word: fossilized
word: Havishamesque
word: idle
word: Miss Havishamesque
word: obsolete
word: old
word: oldfangled
word: old-fashioned
word: old school
word: outdated
word: outmoded
word: out of date
word: out of fashion
word: outworn
word: parachronistic
word: passé
word: superannuated
word: superseded
word: unemployed
word: unoccupied
word: venerable
word: workless
glosses: Obsolete, antiquated.
examples: text: I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.
ref: 1811, Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 2:
text: And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated, superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze.
ref: 1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
synonyms: word: decrepit
word: long in the tooth
word: over the hill
word: elder
word: elderly
word: geriatric
raw_tags: in this metonymic sense
word: gerontologic
raw_tags: in this metonymic sense
word: gerontological
raw_tags: in this metonymic sense
word: long in the tooth
word: matured
word: of a certain age
word: old as Methuselah
word: on in years
word: over the hill
word: senior
word: superannuated
word: ivy-covered
word: preserved
word: wintry
glosses: Retired or discarded due to age.
Derived terms: superannuate