Merriam-webster's Word Of The Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 21, 2025 is: gourmand • \GOOR-mahnd\  • noun A gourmand is a person who loves and appreciates good food and drink. Gourmand can also refer to someone who enjoys eating and drinking to excess. // He was a gourmand who retired to New Orleans to live close to the cuisine he loved best. See the entry > Examples: "... the deck sports a dining area with a barbecue and pizza oven for gourmands." — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 27 Oct. 2023 Did you know? When gourmand first appeared in English texts in the 15th century, it was no compliment: gourmand was a synonym of glutton that was reserved for a greedy eater who consumed well past the point of satiation. The word’s negative connotation mostly remained until English speakers borrowed the similar-sounding (and much more positive) gourmet from French in the 17th century to describe a connoisseur of food and drink. Since then, while the

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 20, 2025 is: inimitable • \in-IM-it-uh-bul\  • adjective Inimitable describes someone or something that is impossible to copy or imitate. // Courtnay delivered the speech in her own inimitable style. See the entry > Examples: “In a nation whose professed ideals include freedom, liberty and independence, every American is charged with an individual self-examination. ... Such a searching self-examination helps us discover our precepts, ethics, ideals, principles, and purpose—a sense of mission. Reverend King discovered his mission as a teenager at Morehouse College. Although the son, grandson and great grandson of ministers, Reverend King initially aspired to be a lawyer. Then he encountered the inimitable Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, President of Morehouse College. ... The rest is history.” — David C. Mills, The (Nashville) Tennessee Tribune, 13 Apr. 2023 Did you know? Something th

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 19, 2025 is: virtuoso • \ver-choo-OH-soh\  • noun Virtuoso is used broadly to refer to a person who does something very skillfully, and is often used specifically to refer to a very skillful musician. // He’s a real virtuoso in the kitchen, whipping up gourmet dishes for his family not just on holidays but on regular weeknights. // Although the violin was her first instrument, she eventually proved to be a virtuoso on the harp. See the entry > Examples: "The newly assembled band finished its engagement and, shortly after, proceeded to New York to record Rich versus Roach (1959), a concept album pitting [Max] Roach in a drum battle with famed bandleader and drum virtuoso Buddy Rich." — Colter Harper, Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, 2024 Did you know? English speakers borrowed the Italian noun virtuoso in the 1600s, but the Italian word h

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 18, 2025 is: minuscule • \MIN-uh-skyool\  • adjective Something described as minuscule is very small. Minuscule can also mean "written in, or in the size or style of, lowercase letters," in which case it can be contrasted with majuscular. // The number of bugs in the latest version of the video game is minuscule compared to the number that surfaced in the beta version. // The ancient manuscripts on display are all in minuscule script. See the entry > Examples: "Resembling a stout field mouse, B. brevicauda is a tiny burrowing mammal with inconspicuous ears and minuscule eyes well hidden behind a long narrow snout." — Bill Schutt, Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans, 2024 Did you know? Minuscule comes from the Latin adjective minusculus ("somewhat smaller" or "fairly small"), which in turn pairs the base of minus ("smaller") with -culus, a diminutive suff

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 17, 2025 is: apprehension • \ap-rih-HEN-shun\  • noun Apprehension most often refers to the fear that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen; it’s a feeling of being worried about the future. The word can also refer to seizure by legal process. // There is growing apprehension that next quarter’s profits will be lower than expected. See the entry > Examples: “Mark Pope felt uncertain. There was a moment, he admitted, after it was clear that he was Kentucky’s choice, when he stood alone at home and grappled with apprehension about a job that offered both spoils he knew well and obstacles, too.” — Myron Medcalf, ESPN, 12 Nov. 2024 Did you know? There’s quite a bit to comprehend about apprehension, so let’s take a closer look at its history. The Latin ancestor of apprehension (and of comprehend, prehensile, and even prison, among others) is the verb prehendere, meaning “t

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 16, 2025 is: parlay • \PAHR-lay\  • verb To parlay something is to use or develop it in order to get something else of greater value. Parlay is often used with the word into. // He hoped to parlay his basketball skills into a college scholarship. // She parlayed $5,000 and years of hard work into a multimillion-dollar company. See the entry > Examples: “Sometimes, celebrities parlay their name and following into big-time sales and hype—though, of course, not all of them (or their projects) are created equal.” — Lora Kelley, The Atlantic, 26 Nov. 2024 Did you know? The word parlay originally belonged exclusively to gambling parlance, where to parlay is to take winnings from a previous bet, along with one’s original stake of money, and use them to make another bet or series of bets. The verb comes from the noun paroli, a borrowing from French—itself borrowed from Italian—that r

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 15, 2025 is: hackneyed • \HAK-need\  • adjective Something is considered hackneyed when it is not interesting, funny, etc., because of being used too often; in other words, it's neither fresh nor original. // The new crime drama's characters are shallow stereotypes who engage one another in hackneyed dialogue. See the entry > Examples: “Any positive lesson here is lost in all the hackneyed jokes, and by the end the movie falls apart entirely.” — Tim Grierson, Vulture, 4 May 2024 Did you know? In his 1926 tome A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, lexicographer H. W. Fowler offers a good deal of advice under the heading “Hackneyed Phrases.” While some of the phrases he cautions against (“too funny for words,” “my better half”) will be familiar to most readers today, others (such as “hinc illae lacrimae”) have mostly fallen into obscurity. Fowler was not the first usage writer to

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 14, 2025 is: deus ex machina • \DAY-us-eks-MAH-kih-nuh\  • noun A deus ex machina is a character or thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel, play, movie, etc., and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve. // The introduction of a new love interest in the final act was the perfect deus ex machina for the main character's happy ending. See the entry > Examples: "The poultry thieves in Emma provide a particularly humorous example of deus ex machina: the arrival of a poultry thief into the surrounding area (on the penultimate page of the novel, no less) and his theft of Mrs. Weston’s turkeys frightens Mr. Woodhouse enough to consent to Emma’s marriage and to allow Mr. Knightley to move into Hartfield." — Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness, 2024 Did you know? The New Latin term deus ex machina is a translation of a

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 13, 2025 is: secular • \SEK-yuh-ler\  • adjective Secular describes things that are not spiritual; that is, they relate more to the physical world than the spiritual world. The word also carries the closely related meaning of "not religious." // Each year, Ian directed his charitable giving toward secular concerns like affordable housing and arts programming for teens. // In her autobiography, the actor mentions that her education in parochial school was not so different from that of secular institutions. See the entry > Examples: "[James] Baldwin eventually left the church, and, although he maintained some of the wonder he gained first in relationship to the theologizing of the church, his aims and orientation became more secular, more humanistic." — Anthony B. Pinn, The Black Practice of Disbelief: An Introduction to the Principles, History, and Communities of Black Nonbelievers, 2024

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 12, 2025 is: leitmotif • \LYTE-moh-teef\  • noun A leitmotif is a dominant recurring theme—something (such as a melody, an idea, or a phrase) repeated many times throughout a book, story, opera, etc. // The overcoming of obstacles and a love of theater are the two leitmotifs of her autobiography. See the entry > Examples: “[F. Scott] Fitzgerald considered his year and a half spent on The Vegetable a complete waste, but I disagree, for he followed it with a new novel written with all the economy and tight structure of a successful play—The Great Gatsby. Both The Vegetable and Gatsby shared the theme of the American Dream (first as a spoof for a comedy, finally as the leitmotif of a lyric novel). I don’t think there has ever been a more elusive, mysterious, intriguing character than Gatsby. He’s pure fiction—and pure Fitzgerald: the hopeful, romantic outsider looking in.” — Charles Scribner III,