Purview

Last chance to do a November post, so here's the last word I stopped to consider: purview. I was typing along and needed to use the word purview in my novel (draft completed yesterday). I knew the meaning of the word, but it was one that somehow didn't look quite right when I typed it out. So I stopped and looked at it, tried "per" instead of "pur" (which definitely was not it), then asked my roommate Donna. Neither of us was near a dictionary, including the online versions. So I left what I had typed: p-u-r-v-i-e-w. Later I went to my NaNoWriMo write-in (click here for my joyful report), and when I got back to our apartment, Donna had left one of our many dictionaries open to PURVIEW. Yep, I spelled it correctly! Oh, yeah, wanna talk about what it means? This is the definition of it that I intended:

purview
range of vision; scope

Interesting use of the word by the Boston Globe a few days ago:

Obama may give Clinton purview in area where they differed most

The definition as used this way is "range or scope of authority."