quotidian
adjective

-  everyday; commonplace; ordinary

- recurring daily (esp of attacks of malarial fever)

The Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster

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WORD PHRASE ORIGIN

The word "quotidian" has a clear Latin lineage: Latin root: quotidianus meaning "daily", which breaks down into: quot- meaning "how many" or "as many as" and dies meaning "day”, and -anus an adjective-forming suffix.

The word entered English in the 14th century through Medieval French cotidian / quotidien.

What's interesting is how it ended up having two slightly different uses:

1. The literal meaning: "occurring daily" (as in "quotidian fever" - a medical term for fever that spikes daily)


2. The metaphorical meaning: "ordinary / mundane" (developed from the idea that daily things are commonplace)

The evolution makes sense: things that happen every day → things that are ordinary → things that are unremarkable.

This same pattern appears in many languages: German: alltäglich (literally "all-daily”), Spanish: cotidiano, Italian: quotidiano.

The medical usage remains more faithful to the original Latin meaning of strictly "daily," while the common usage has drifted toward meaning "mundane." It's a good example of how a word can maintain its original meaning in technical contexts while developing broader meanings in everyday use.

FOOTNOTE: In some of the Romance languages “quotidian” has still another meaning, based on the “daily” meaning: “le quotidien” in French, “il quotidiano” in Italian and “cotidanul” in Romanian mean daily and by extension “the daily newspaper” (but without the respective word for newspaper). We also say "the Daily" in English.

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MAGIC IN THE MUNDANE

- "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." - Robert Brault

- "Success is not a spectacular achievement. Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." - Jim Rohn

- "The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary." - Christopher Priest

- "It is not in the grand gestures, but in the small daily acts that life’s greatest treasures are found." – Unknown 

- "Life is not made up of dramatic moments. Life is made up of Wednesday afternoons." - Annie Dillard

- "You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute." - Mitch Albom

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SYNONYMS

accustomed, anaemic, average, banal, basic, blah, bland, bog-standard, boring, bread and butter, by the book, characterless, colourless, common as dirt, common or garden, commonplace, conventional, customary, cut-and-dried, day after day, day by day, day-to-day, dime a dozen, dreary, drudging, dry (as dust), dull (as dishwater), dusty, everyday, expected, factory-made, familiar, garden-variety, generic, habitual, hackneyed, half-pie, ho-hum, homely, homespun, humdrum, jejune, just another brick in the wall, lacklustre, leaden, lifeless, lowly, mainstream, matter-of-fact, mediocre, middle-of-the-road, middling, monotonous, mundane, nine-to-five, nondescript, normal, nothing special, nothing to write home about, numbing, old hat, on a daily basis, ordinary, par for the course, pedestrian, per diem, plain vanilla, played out, predictable, prosaic, QUOTIDIAN, regular, repeated, repetitious, repetitive, routine, run-of-the-mill, same old same old, samey, standard, standard-issue, stereotyped, stereotypical, stock, straight from central casting, suburban, tedious, ten a penny, the usual suspects, tiresome,  trite, trivial, typical, unremarkable, unvaried, usual, vanilla, white-bread, workaday, workday

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“Even the most QUOTIDIAN moments can sparkle if you know where to look.”

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