Recently I used the word beauteous in a correspondence with a colleague, who asked me if this was really a word. It’s one I use all the time, but having been challenged, I went and looked it up in the free online Compact Oxford English Dictionary which you can get to through a portal called OneLook that I use all the time.
Oxford defines it as a literary word meaning beautiful, and notes it is from the late Middle English: derived from “beauty” on the pattern of bounteous and plenteous (as they put it).
It’s not quite the quality and perhaps unintentional wit of the Palinism “refudiate” which she invented to the hilarity of all literate people (refute + repudiate) – but beauteous is a lovely conjunction of ideas. Extra helpings of beauty.
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