What does ‘coruscating’ mean?

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Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: coruscating…

I briefly worked for Conrad Black. Not face-to-face (thank goodness); he owned the newspaper chain where I was an editor.

Black once controlled Hollinger International, which published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (U.S.), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), and daily newspapers across Canada. But the board fired him in 2004 and shortly thereafter, the US government began prosecuting him. Ultimately, he was convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice (two of these charges were overturned on appeal) and he ended up serving a total of 37 months in prison

At the newspaper for which I worked, he was famous for his bullying attitude, his contempt for journalists and his enormous vocabulary. But even the people who didn’t like him, usually respected his historical writing, which was prodigious. My reader John Friesen has recently been gobbling up Black’s Canadian history book called Rise to Greatness,

“I don’t want to put it down,” Friesen says. “The exhaustive coverage of every politician’s breath during the time leading up to and immediately after Confederation is, of course, most interesting to me and changes my picture of why we’re here.”

John also found a word-of-the week in this book: coruscating. Here’s how Black used it:
The light was coruscating from the walls.
To coruscate means to give off or reflect light in bright beams or flashes. The word dates back to 1705, and comes from the Latin coruscatus, past participle of coruscate meaning “to vibrate or glitter.”
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