He packed all his camping ____, including the tent and cooking stove.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The police found drug ____ hidden inside the vehicle during the routine traffic stop.
Word Origin & History
Borrowed from Medieval Latin paraphernālia (“goods which a wife brings over and above her dowry”), use as noun (short for paraphernālia bona (“paraphernal goods”)) of neuter plural of paraphernālis, from Late Latin parapherna + Latin -ālis (suffix forming adjectives), from Ancient Greek παράφερνα (parápherna), a compound of παρά (pará, “beside”) + φερνή (phernḗ, “dowry”). In the propertied classes, a dowry was placed under the control of the husband, while the paraphernalia which she brought with her remained the wife’s property.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Then the boys arrived, with their camping paraphernalia, and in such bubbling good spirits that the girls were infected with them, for they had become rather lonesome of late."
— 1913, Laura Lee Hope, chapter 21, in The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake:
"People such as William James and the Stephensons (with whom he collaborated) may have been the movers and shakers of the early railways, but there was other, less exalted bods who constructed all the paraphernalia—including stations."
— 2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and Facts behind railway plaques: Reading (1840)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 56:
"So she told her what her husband had said and sat with her awhile; but, presently, up came porters, who brought all her clothes and paraphernalia and what not else belonged to her of goods and vessels from her husband’s house and deposited them in that of her mother."
— 1901, Unknown, “The House with the Belvedere”, in John Payne, transl., The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, volume 5: