“Compendium (noun): A resume of written work, text, or area of inquiry; brief but comprehensive summary; collection or inventory. Adjective: compendious; Adverb: compendiously; Noun: compendiousness.
‘We—whoever “we” are—might define the compulsion as a pleasurable urge to express through verbal imagery a compendium of certain inexplicably correlated vagaries observed by him in mental patients, on an off, since his first hear at Chose.’ Vladimir Nabokov, Ada”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Mark's Text Terminal 