I suppose I have to accept this word as it's in a number of the Oxford dictionaries, and in Wiktionary. However, despite poring over several definitions, I don't have much idea of what it means.
Probably the most technical definition is that given by Wiktionary:
(semiotics) Any of the non-signifying constituents of signifiers.
Letters of the alphabet are the figurae that make up a written word.
The online Oxford defines it as:
(in literary theory) a person or thing representing or symbolizing a fact or ideal
I
think this is a completely different word, but I'm not sure. The online Oxford provides a few example sentences to help make the meaning clear. This is one of them:
They have described how the Renaissance blazon expresses the desire to fetishize and idolize the female body by fragmenting the subjective Other and reshaping her as a figura for the male poet's autonomy.
Well, that clears things up.
The Shorter Oxford has multiple definitions:
1. Theology. A type of a person. Cf. figure noun 8. M20.
2. A person who represents a higher or supervening reality. literary. M20.
b. An act or deed that is representative or symbolic. M20.
Even my battered 1976 edition of the COD has the word. (Battered cod - yum!) But on the strength of that reference alone I probably wouldn't allow the word, because in those days dictionaries printed some headwords in italics to signify that they were still considered as foreign. And
figura was one of those words in italics in the 1976 COD. But current lexicographical practice seems to have dropped that distinction. I suppose we have to assume that a word considered to warrant inclusion in an English dictionary is an English word.
Finding usage examples of
figura is not so easy, because of all the Italian phrases that people like to use, such as
bella figura, and a surname that some people have. One example was in "The Plague and Immunity in Othello", an article in a 2017 issue of the journal
Comparative Drama:
When we read the tragedy's morality play cast toward the end that fashions Iago as a timeless figura of the eternal death or Vice, we have pretty closely graphed Shakespeare's contemporary fear of the plague often simply called "death."
The plural is apparently
figurae as in the book title
Feminine Figurae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100-1475 (Studies in Medieval History and Culture) (Volume 10), by Rebecca L.R. Garber.
I'll add
figura and
figurae as rare words. Try using them in an email today.
