Word of the Day

Thursday December 17, 2009

choler [KOLL-ur; KOLE-ur]

noun

Irritation of the passions; anger; wrath.
A humor that was once believed to be secreted by the liver and to cause irritability and anger.

Kenneth Cranham, as Max, and Nigel Lindsay, as Lenny, conduct the opening scene impeccably, revelling in Pinter's lethal use of language and astute distillation of cockney rhythms of speech. Cranham, permanently flushed with choler, is a vicious mix of sadism and sentimentality; Lindsay, reptilian and sly, uses charm like a flick-knife. Danny Dyer's vain Joey and Anthony O'Donnell's peevish Sam add to the nasty cocktail of curdled pride and misogyny.

Sarah Hemming, "The Homecoming, Almeida Theatre, London", FT.com, Feb 10, 2008
''It has its faults and touches of Tory choler now and then,'' wrote Stanley Walker, city editor from 1928 to 1935, ''but it is alive.'' Which is saying something in an age when many newspapers are on all fours. The party was in the Trib's former office, on West 41st Street, which is now the track-lit journalism school of the City University of New York.

Alan Feuer, "Remembering the Death, but Mostly the Life, of a Storied Newspaper", New York Times, Sep 28, 2006
His complexion--if we may guess by him at the age of forty--was sanguine, with a mixture of choler; and yet his motion was slow even in his youth, and so was his speech, never expressing an earnestness in either of them, but an humble gravity suitable to the aged.

Izaak Walton (1593 - 1683) An English writer. Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, Volume Two (1898)

Origin of the Word

Choler, approximately 1390, derives from Old French colre "bile, anger," from Late Latin cholera "bile."