Word of the Day for Thursday, February 23, 2012
plenum \PLEE-nuhm\,
noun:
1. A full assembly, as a joint legislative assembly.
2. The state or a space in which a gas, usually air, is contained at a pressure greater than atmospheric pressure.
3. A space, usually above a ceiling or below a floor, that can serve as a receiving chamber for air that has been heated or cooled to be distributed to inhabited areas.
4. The whole of space regarded as being filled with matter (opposed to vacuum).
The plenum allegedly demanded that Bukharin cease his hunger strike.
-- Yuri Trifonov, "Disappearance"
They convened a plenary session of the Central Committee, and the plenum sided with them — the game was over!
-- Feliks Ivanovich Chuev, "Molotov Remembers"
Plenum is literally the opposite of a vacuum. It came to be used in the sense of a full meeting of legislators in 1772 in Sweden.
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