It's the Word of the Day podcast for July 25th.
Today's word is sui generis, also pronounced sui generis and sui generis,
spelled as two words as they would be in Latin,
S-U-I-G-E-N-E-R-I-S.
Sui generis is a formal adjective used to describe someone or something in a class or group of its own,
or, in other words, unlike anyone or anything else.
Here's the term used in a sentence from Rolling Stone.
TV on the radio, the celebrated group whose experimental amalgam of rock, post-punk, electronic,
and soul made it sui generis in the 2000s New York scene, knew it was time for a break.
It was 2019, and after nearly 20 years and five albums together,
the non-stop demands of recording and touring had taken its creative and physical toll.
Many English words ultimately trace back to the Latin forms gener, or genus,
which are variously translated as birth, race, kind, and class.
Offspring of those roots include the words general, generate, generous, generic, and gender.
But Sui Generis is truly a one-of-a-kind Genoese descendant that English speakers have used to describe singular things
since the late 1600s.
Its earliest uses were in scientific contexts,
but where it once mostly characterized substances, principles, diseases, and even rocks,
thought to be the only representative of their class or group, its use expanded by the early 1900s,
and it is now used more generally for anything that stands alone.