cachinnate

English

WOTD – 26 August 2007

Etymology

From Latin cachinnō (“laugh aloud”), of onomatopoeic origin.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈkækɪneɪt/

• Audio (US):

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Verb

cachinnate (third-person singular simple present cachinnates, present participle cachinnating, simple past and past participle cachinnated)

1. (intransitive) To laugh loudly, immoderately, or too often.

   Synonym: guffaw

   The villain began to cachinnate and twirl his moustache.

   • 1928 February, H[oward] P[hillips] Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, in Farnsworth Wright, editor, Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, volume 11, number 2, Indianapolis, Ind.: Popular Fiction Pub. Co., →OCLC, pages 159–178 and 287:

     There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Derived terms

• cachinnation
• cachinnator
• cachinnatory

Further reading

• “cachinnate”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Latin

Verb

cachinnāte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of cachinnō