Brand Name Vocab: Quotidian
If you live in New York, Los Angeles, or any of 24 other cities in 19 different countries, you may be familiar with the cafe chain Le Pain Quotidien. The name is French for “the daily bread.”
In English, quotidian (note the different spelling) means “daily, everyday, commonplace” and can have the negative connotation of “mundane, unexceptional.”
Choose your own answer to this GRE Antonyms problem before clicking “more.”
QUOTIDIAN :
A. diurnal
B. matutinal
C. sporadic
D. pedestrian
E. maudlin
There are a couple of possibilities for the opposite of quotidian — the word we write on our paper might be something like “extraordinary, unusual” or something like “fresh, exciting, original” or something like “not happening every day, irregular.” As it turns out, it’s this last meaning that is used in this problem — the answer is C, sporadic, which means “occurring at irregular intervals.”
Note that pedestrian is a synonym trap! Diurnal can also mean daily, or can mean, literally, “happening during the daytime (as opposed to the nighttime).” It is not typically used in the sense of “ordinary.”
Incidentally, matutinal means “happening in the morning,” and maudlin means “tearfully sentimenal,” like a lot of pretty bad movies marketed to middle-aged women.