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I’d like to start a new tradition in 2010 of keeping a log of interesting words I find throughout my travels. Definitions are from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate 11.

Today’s word: hecatomb

1. an ancient Greek and Roman sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle 2. the sacrifice or slaughter of many victims.

Found in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, in “In Memoriam, J.F.K.”:

“In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed [this bullet] for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.”