Word for the Day-- Dvandva

"Dvandva" is a linguistic term.  It refers to a type of compound term where both parts are of equal importance and are related to each other.  The rule of thumb seems to be that if it could be split into two words separated by an "and" without changing the basic semantic content, then it qualifies.

This is a relatively uncommon thing in English, where that sort of equality is hard to come by, but there are some examples-- the OED uses (in one of its quotes) the compound "prince-consort," which possibly says something about the OED, or maybe about the English language, I don't know.  Webster's Third New Etc. uses the slightly more plausible "secretary-treasurer" and "bittersweet" as examples, although it also uses "sociopolitical," which strikes me as not being a very good example because "socio" is a prefix and doesn't stand on its own.  Perhaps the equivalence in importance supersedes that; certainly, the term indicates an equivalence of social and political influence.

The term itself is derived from Sanskrit, where it means something like "pair," (literally "two and two.")  Dva is related to a fairly large number of other words for "two" in other languages, such as "duo" (Latin), "dyo" (Greek), "dva" (Russian), etc.  In the Sanskrit language, apparently, this sort of equivalence pair is much more common.  It's also common in some Asian languages, according to Wikipedia.