Diatribe (Noun) : a bitter and abusive speech or piece of writing.

I was confronted with this word while reading McGrath Charles. “A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport.”

“Will Self’s new novel, “The Book of Dave” (Bloomsbury USA), is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his ex-wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text.”

This was the first time i encountered this word so i didn’t know the meaning at all. When I looked up the word i found three definitions however they weren’t that alike. So i substituted the definitions into the context the word was included in. I also used the examples “The article is a diatribe against mainstream media.” and “a bitter diatribe about how unfair the tax system is” to demonstrate the word and found “A bitter and abusive speech or piece of writing” to be the more accurate definition of the word.