The Collaborative International Dictionary
Logomachy \Lo*gom"a*chy\, n. [Gr. ?; lo`gos word + ? fight, battle, contest: cf. F. logomachie.]
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Contention in words merely, or a contention about words; a war of words.
The discussion concerning the meaning of the word ``justification'' . . . has largely been a mere logomachy.
--L. Abbott. A game of word making.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"contention about, or with, words," 1560s, from logo- + -machy.
Wiktionary
n. 1 dispute over the meaning of words 2 A conflict waged only as a battle of words
Usage examples of "logomachy".
He could have discoursed more happily on Horace and Virgil than on Barbara Celarent and the barren logomachies of Mr Reid.
Downie, Professor of Logomachy, and perhaps the most subtle dialectician in Erewhon.
Saxon, on the contrary, delighted in the logomachy, though little enough she understood of it, following mainly by feeling, and once in a while catching a high light.
Clerambault to play with more care, and choose a less slippery ground than logomachy, and on the other it brought him in contact with men better informed as to the facts who furnished him with the necessary information.
Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw.
But at the same time as he prepared this mere logomachy he had the good sense to wish himself possessed of a poker or even an empty bottle.
To this epoch of ardent abstractions and impassioned logomachies belongs the philosophical reign of Julian, an illuminatus and Initiate of the first order, who believed in the unity of God and the universal Dogma of the Trinity, and regretted the loss of nothing of the old world but its magnificent symbols and too graceful images.
He could have discoursed more happily on Horace and Virgil than on Barbara Celarent and the barren logomachies of Mr Reid.
Being, altogether, a creature of impulses, he certainly could not be ever employed in doxologies, or engaged in the logomachy of churchmen.