Is this word really necessary?

jumentous: "that smells like that of the urine of a horse".

--- by J. L. Speranza
--

M. Quinion reports in today's World Wide Words: "Is this word really necessary?"

"The word 'jumentous' is usually explained as meaning a smell like that of the
urine of a horse."

In 1992, in "The Superior Person's Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words," Peter Bowler asked of it: "Is this word really necessary?"

----

Perhaps not obligatory, though?

---

Quinion adds: "'jumentous' comes from Latin "jumentum", which the Oxford
English Dictionary explains means a yoke-beast, from "jugum", a
yoke."

"Though this might reasonably include oxen, the Oxford Latin
Dictionary helpfully notes - somewhat surprisingly in view of its
origin - that in Roman times it usually meant horses or mules, not
cattle."

"Similarly, the obsolete English word "jument", from the
same source, could mean any beast of burden, but was most often
applied to a horse or donkey."

It was first used is a report of the symptoms of
a sick person, in 1801:


"No motion of the bowels; urine very scanty, red with a
jumentous and lateritious sediment."

The British Journal of Homoeopathy.

The word was deemed to be unfamiliar enough that it was defined in a footnote as relating to a working horse."


"By the end of the century", Quinion notes, "the word had become extremely rare."