Today’s Word

Circumlocution

SUR-kum-loh-KYOO-shun

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1 Definition

The use of many words to express an idea that could be stated more directly, often to avoid saying something plainly or uncomfortably.

2 In Use

Instead of admitting he'd forgotten the meeting, he launched into a circumlocution about scheduling conflicts and calendar confusion.

3 Word Origin

circum Lat. · around → locutio Lat. · a speaking → circumlocution 16th c. English

Circumlocution traces back to Latin circum, meaning around, joined with locutio, a speaking or utterance, itself rooted in the verb loqui, to speak. Together the compound literally meant a speaking around something, a linguistic detour rather than a straight path to the point. The word entered English in the sixteenth century through writers and rhetoricians who needed a term for the increasingly elaborate, evasive prose favored in legal and courtly circles. Over time its meaning sharpened from a neutral description of wordiness into a slightly critical label for speech that dodges directness.

💡Fun Fact

Charles Dickens gave circumlocution its most famous satirical home in Little Dorrit, inventing the fictional government department called the Circumlocution Office, an institution whose entire purpose is to delay, obscure, and avoid ever actually answering a question. The joke landed because bureaucratic language really does specialize in this kind of evasive padding, and the phrase 'circumlocution office' has occasionally been borrowed since to describe any agency that seems built to stall rather than resolve. Linguists sometimes distinguish circumlocution from mere verbosity by noting that circumlocution is often strategic, a way of talking around an awkward truth rather than simply failing to edit oneself. It's also a term speech therapists use clinically, describing a technique where someone unable to recall a specific word talks around it using related phrases instead.