Word of the Day:

“The Dallas area was a hotbed of competitive debate, and, at first, the oratorical polish of [Rebecca F.] Kuang’s teammates was intimidating. She spent months being coached on the art of the syllogism, a kind of logical argument in which one deduces a conclusion from a set of premises. ‘The idea that you could take something that seemed up to personal charisma or rhetorical choice and map it to this very rigid, argumentative structure was mind-blowing,’ she said.” — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 25 Aug. 2025

More example sentences

For those trained in formal argument, the syllogism is a classical form of deduction, specifically an argument consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion. One example is the inference that “kindness is praiseworthy” from the premises “every virtue is praiseworthy” and “kindness is a virtue.” Syllogism came to English through Anglo-French from the Latin noun syllogismus, which in turn can be traced back to the Greek verb syllogizesthai, which combines logizesthai (meaning “to calculate,” and coming from logos, meaning “word” or “reckoning”) with syl-, which comes from syn-, meaning “with” or “together.”