extraordinary
adjective
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What is the difference between extraordinary and extra ordinary?
Prefixes can be tricky things, often carrying meanings that differ from what one might expect. Additionally, some prefixes are spelled like independent English words, yet may have meanings that are different from those words. Such is the case with the word extra and the prefix extra-.
The word extra is used as a noun, adjective, and an adverb. When used as a separate word, as in the sentence “It was an extra ordinary day,” “extra” is functioning as an adverb meaning “very.” An “extra ordinary day” is a day that is very ordinary. In contrast, the prefix extra- means “outside or beyond.” Attached to “ordinary,” in “It was an extraordinary day,” the meaning changes markedly, to “It was a day beyond ordinary.”
Synonyms
Examples of extraordinary in a Sentence
Rosamund Daw, Nature, 13 Oct. 2005
Jimi Hendrix is one of those extraordinary hubs of music where everybody lands at some point. Every musician passes through Hendrix International Airport eventually. … He is the common denominator of every style of contemporary music.
—John Mayer, Rolling Stone, 15 Apr. 2004
Like the eighteenth-century Scots, whose similar borderland situation stimulated an extraordinary renaissance in letters, natural science, and social science, the Americans' ambivalent identities led them to the interstices of metropolitan thought where were found new views and new approaches to the old.
—Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 2003
Books can even have merits that are owed to their lack of literary quality: Agatha Christie's whodunits display an extraordinary ingenuity in their plotting, but the beauty of the puzzle requires cardboard characters and total implausibility in motives and reasons.
—Richard Jenkyns, New Republic, 28 Jan. 2002
The researchers made an extraordinary discovery.
The race is an extraordinary event.
Steven Greenhut, Orange County Register, 15 Nov. 2024
This extension was approved at an extraordinary general meeting held on July 18, 2024.
—Quartz Bot, Quartz, 14 Nov. 2024
Parker recorded interviews with 12 British men and women who had been convicted of murder, then transcribed and edited their words to create a series of extraordinary first-person narratives.
—The Week Us, theweek, 12 Nov. 2024
The fire, which burned an as-yet-undetermined number of homes and buildings while threatening Grand Lake, increased an extraordinary 150,000 acres in size Wednesday night and Thursday to become the second-largest wildfire in Colorado’s recorded history.
—Katie Langford, The Denver Post, 10 Nov. 2024
See all Example Sentences for extraordinary 
Dictionary Entries Near extraordinary
Cite this Entry
“Extraordinary.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraordinary. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
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extraordinary
adjective
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extraordinary
adjective
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