Definition of "lucubration" [lu•cu•bra•tion]

• Laborious study or meditation. (noun)
• Writing produced by laborious effort or study, especially pedantic or pretentious writing. Often used in the plural. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Four days after this learned 'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who “in the most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this Metropolis.”"
• "As such, he was the recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks; but this particular lucubration was so different from the average ruck of similar letters that, instead of putting it into the waste-basket, he had turned it over to a reporter."
• "Most of all, he loved [comic books] for the pictures and the stories they contained, the inspiration and lucubration of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public education and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art."