
adj. Beyond or different from what is natural, or according to the regular course of things, but not clearly supernatural or miraculous; therefore, something which is strange, inexplicable, extraordinary, uncommon, irregular or abnormal.
n. A 19-line poem of fixed form consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain on two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas and joined as the final couplet of the quatrain.
[French, from Italian villanella, from feminine of villanello, rustic, from villano, peasant, from Vulgar Latin *vllnus, from Latin vlla, country house.]
Reuters reports on how tens of thousands of formerly hyphenated words have lost their hyphenation in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. LINK→