Meaning of recondite | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A recondite (hidden or obscure) person or thing.
   rare
2. A scholar or other person who is recondite, that is, who has mastery over his or her field, including its esoteric minutiae.
   rare

Equivalents

Examples

“[T]he Duchess, and the dandies, and the member's wife and all the rest of their tribulations, were happily hidden from the view by the towering bouquets of the gold plateau vases at the head of the room. [...] A contra-dance after supper was felt to be a national duty; but behind those fatal vases a plot had already been concocted by the recondites for rewarding their previous self-denial, not by a quadrille, but a galoppe.”

“Whether subsidence plunged the huge morass, / With vegetation, soil, and trees, en masse— / Or, if the flood had drown'd the boggy all, / As streaming torrents roar'd in surly bawl— / Let dons decide, on whom these points devolve; / Such recondites are truely hard to solve.”

“Such as those which being uniques cannot be perfected without new punches, and if they were made complete, it would be no more than oleum et operam, etc., because they are either out of use or the times afford better, as the Antique Hebrew (spec. 7); Leusden's Samaritan (spec. 27); 2-line Great Primer Hebrew (spec. 38); the Runic, Gothic, and other recondites, the matrices for which are incomplete or useless.”

“Here we have an uncommon acquaintance with the conditions of society in the mass, which, perhaps, some of our recondites would hardly be disposed to expect in the case of a man of a character so eminent and philosophical as [Dugald] Stewart, and addicted to studies removing him so far from the sphere of common mortals.”

“If the administrative economists should adopt the widespread practice of their pedagogue colleagues and express themselves, in major policy papers as elsewhere, in mathematical equations rather than words, administrative prerogative would be reinforced by recourse to the professional recondites. [...] This is a serious matter, since any obscurantism and any retreat from public accountability by the civil service cause distrust of people against their government, and of the legislative branch against the bureaucracy.”

“They are on middle ground now, that area of jazz which welcomes hardy perennials as well as mellowed recondites.”

CEFR level