parenthesis
Meanings
Plural: parentheses
Noun
- either of two punctuation marks (or) used to enclose textual material
- a message that departs from the main subject
- 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.
- Either of a pair of brackets, especially (mainly US) round brackets, ( and ) (used to enclose parenthetical material in a text).
- A digression; the use of such digressions.
- 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.
Origin / 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”).
Synonyms
apposition, aside, digression, divagation, excursus, parathesis, paren, parentheme, parenthesis-point, round bracket
Scrabble Score: 16
parenthesis is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordparenthesis is not valid in Scrabble (MW) Merriam-Webster Dictionary
parenthesis is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary