Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 17, 2010) - Finding a definition

I was doing a bit of reading this morning about the history of monasteries, monks and early libraries when I ran across this word:

     extra-claustral 

Can you figure out what it means?  (And no, it's not a misspelled word.)

I'm interested in both the 'straightforward' meaning of the word and the ways in which it's used metaphorically.

Tomorrow I'll write a bit about the obvious strategies for searching out the definitions of words, and how to cope when the obvious methods don't quite work so well.

2 comments:

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  2. ok, my approach was reading all the snippets that had the word "extra-claustral" in it and trying to glean the meaning. It seems to me that it means something that is outside of the bounds of the monastery/convent. I'm guessing the metaphorical sense might refer to any concept and just a physical location? so the extra-claustral reading is reading that's not done with a monastic supervision?
    Another approach I tried was trying to find a specialized religious dictionary and searching there but I didn't look long enough there.

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