cromulent

English

WOTD – 17 December 2017

Etymology

A humorous, intentionally morphologically opaque neologism and nonce word coined by American television writer David X. Cohen (born 1966) for “Lisa the Iconoclast”, a 1996 episode of the animated sitcom The Simpsons.

However, it may be analyzed as an ultimately Greco-Latin term, hypothetically as if from *cromulentus (then borrowed to English via Old French; compare corpulent, excellent, etc.), from fictitious prefix *cromus (“rightness?”) +‎ -ulentus (“full of, abounding in”).

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹɒmjʊlənt/, /-jə-/
- Audio (UK) (file)
(General American) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹɑmjʊlənt/, /-jə-/
Hyphenation: crom‧u‧lent

Adjective

cromulent (comparative more cromulent, superlative most cromulent)

(humorous, rare) Fine, acceptable or correct. [from 1996]
Antonym: anomalous
- 1996 February 18, David X. Cohen, “Lisa the Iconoclast”, in The Simpsons, season 7, episode 16:
  Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before moving to Springfield.
  Ms. Hoover: I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word.
  […]
  Principal Skinner: He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance.
- 2005 August 27, MC Frontalot (lyrics and music), “Nerdcore Rising”, in Nerdcore Rising‎:
  Nerdcore could rise up, it could get elevated.
  Oh, and wouldn’t all of those tough rappers hate it
  if the nerdcore rose up and got elevated.
  We consider the possibleness of this not overstated.
  And I know that "possibleness" is not a cromulent word;
  every syllable injected is intended to be the one you heard
  (an absurd juxtaposition of mission and goal).
- 2006 April 10, “Obituaries and in memoriams: Benjamin Sidney Linton”, in The Charlotte Observer:
  He had a boundless passion for music and entertained many with his beautiful voice and perfectly cromulent sense of humor.
- 2008, David A. Karp, “Users and Security”, in John Osborn and Laurel R. T. Ruma, editors, Windows Vista Annoyances (Tips, Secrets and Solutions), Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, OL 10781059M, page 505:
  Of course, you may encounter a new program that doesn't work reliably with UNC paths, and this is a perfectly cromulent workaround.
- 2008, Alan M. Polansky, “Connections and Comparisons”, in Observed Confidence Levels: Theory and Application, Boca Raton, Fla.: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, →ISBN, OL 12313827M, section 7.3 (Multiple Comparisons), page 216:
  There are certainly other cromulent techniques which may perform well for certain models and assumptions.
- 2009, Bryan O'Sullivan; John Goerzen; Don Stewart, “Functional Programming”, in Mike Loukides, editor, Real World Haskell (Code You Can Believe In), Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, OL 22647856M, page 86:
  How well does this function work? For positive integers, it's perfectly cromulent: […]

Derived terms

cromulence

Translations

fine, acceptable or correct

Finnish: kurantti (fi)
German: allumpassend (nonce, in The Simpsons)