The back-page notebook in the Times Literary Supplement the other week was pondering whether the word obnixely had ever really been used. It means ‘earnestly, strenuously’, but I can see that there is not much point using it if no one knows what it means.
The prefix ob- generates a goodly store of seldom used words: obacerate (‘to stop the mouth’); obcaecate (‘blind, uncomprehending’); obganiate (‘to be tediously repetitious’); obstupely (‘dully’) and the splendid obeliscolychny (‘lighthouse’). One such word never did exist: oblive was entered in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1902 as meaning ‘to forget’, but it was copied from a misreading of oblivious as oblyving by the 18th-century lexicographer Francis Grose.
As for obnixely, since it derives from Latin, there will be some who can work it out. Indeed this seems to explain why it was coined in the first place.
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