superannuated

English

WOTD – 11 January 2013, 11 January 2015

Etymology

From the Latin superannuatus (“more than one year old”), from super (“over”) (English super-) + annus (“year”) (English annual).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˌsupɚˈænjuˌeɪtɪd/
• Hyphenation: su‧per‧an‧nu‧at‧ed

• Audio (US):

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• Audio (General Australian):

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Adjective

superannuated (comparative more superannuated, superlative most superannuated)

1. Obsolete, antiquated.

   Synonyms: archaic, dated, out of date, outdated, outmoded; see also Thesaurus:obsolete

   • 1886 [1882], Henry James, The Point of View‎^[1], London: Macmillan and Co.:

     In Europe it’s too dreary—the sapience, the solemnity, the false respectability, the verbosity, the long disquisitions on superannuated subjects.

   • 1888–1891, Herman Melville, “[Billy Budd, Foretopman.] Chapter XXV.”, in Billy Budd and Other Stories, London: John Lehmann, published 1951, →OCLC:

     The above, appearing in a publication now long ago superannuated and forgotten, is all that hitherto has stood in human record to attest what manner of men respectively were John Claggart and Billy Budd.

   • 2007 June 1, “Sledgehammers and hard drives”, in The Economist:

     Your correspondent has a handful of superannuated computers lying around the home. The sprightliest of the bunch—a 400-megahertz Pentium II that came loaded with Windows NT4.0—has found a new lease on life as a Linux server.

   • 2009 March 24, Larissa Dubecki, “Critic's view”, in The Age:

     To call the sexual politics of Ladette to Lady old-fashioned is an understatement. It's a horrifying revival of superannuated attitudes about women dressed up as an educational excursion into young womanhood that exploits its subjects by loading them up on alcohol when the cameras are rolling.

   • 2010, Bruce Rich, To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India‎^[2], Beacon Press, published 2010, →ISBN:

     Files written fifteen or twenty years ago on superannuated computers and obsolete operating systems are for practical purposes irretrievable.

   • 2010, Stuart Mann, Gordon Murray, Art of the Formula 1 Race Car, Motorbooks, published 2010, →ISBN, page 14:

     The 158 was a delicate and not especially sure-handling device, but by now its engine had been modified to produce 250 horsepower, which gave it a decisive speed advantage over the superannuated old clunkers that were predominately arranged against it.

   • 2014 November 6, Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’”, in New York Times‎^[3]:

     Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.

2. Retired or discarded due to age.

   Synonyms: decrepit, long in the tooth, over the hill; see also Thesaurus:elderly

   • 1811, Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 2:

     I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.

   • 1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

     And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated, superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze.

Derived terms

• superannuate

Translations

obsolete, antiquated

• Dutch: obsoleet (nl),verouderd (nl)
• Finnish: vanhanaikainen (fi), vanhentunut (fi), yli-ikäinen (fi)
• French: obsolète (fr),dépassé (fr)
• German: veraltet (de)
• Hungarian: elévült (hu), kiöregedett (hu)
• Portuguese: obsoleto (pt), antiquado (pt)
• Russian: устаре́вший (ru) (ustarévšij)

retired or discarded due to age

• Dutch: gepensioneerd (nl), afgedankt (nl)
• French: pensionné (fr),licencié (fr)
• German: pensioniert (de), veraltet (de)
• Hungarian: nyugalmazott (hu), kiselejtezett (hu)
• Portuguese: aposentado (pt)

Verb

superannuated

1. simple past and past participle of superannuate