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''impedimenta'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260218114101-00-⌔

impedimenta - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

impedimenta

  • Equipment intended for an activity that serves as more of a hindrance than a help, especially military baggage.
    • ✤ On the plains they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women and children loaded with impedimenta.1
    • ✤ Dashing back to my compartment, I grabbed my impedimenta - what my companion thought of the maniac who alighted at a station only half-way to the first booked stop I don’t know! - got out, hurried under the subway, and was into my 10.45 comfortably before its departure.2
    • ✤ Games impedimenta — hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out — lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.3
    • ✤ There was no sign of piano, organ, hymn-books, church programs—the familiar ecclesiastical impedimenta we saw every Sunday.4
  • plural of impedimentum

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin impedimenta, circa 1600. Compare impediment.5

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ɪmˌpɛdɪˈmɛntə/

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1892, Julian Ralph, On Canada’s Frontier: ↩

  2. 1939 June, “Pertinent Paragraphs: A Surprise at Didcot”, in Railway Magazine, page 452: ↩

  3. 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 20: ↩

  4. 1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC: ↩

  5. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “impedimenta”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

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Secondary

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