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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

arcane.

Understood by only a few.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ɑɹˈkeɪn/General-American

  1. Understood by only a few.

    arcane rituals
    arcane knowledge

  2. Obscure, mysterious.

    broadly
    arcane origins
    arcane details

  3. Requiring secret or mysterious knowledge to understand.

  4. Extremely old (e.g. interpretation or knowledge), and possibly irrelevant.

    an arcane law
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂erk-der. Latin arca Proto-Indo-European *-nós Proto-Italic *-nos Proto-Italic *-ānos Latin -ānus Latin arcānusbor. English arcane Borrowed from Latin arcānus (“hidden, secret”), from arceō (“to shut up, enclose”); cognate with Latin arca (“a chest”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.