The Word of the Day for June 30 is:
unbeknownst \un-bih-NOHNST\ adjective: happening or existing without the knowledge of someone specified
Example sentence: Unbeknownst to Clarice, we had been planning a surprise baby shower for her for weeks.
Did you know?
"Unbeknownst" derives from "beknown," an obsolete synonym of "known." But for a word with a straightforward history, "unbeknownst" and its older and less common variant "unbeknown" have created quite a flap among usage commentators. Despite widespread use (including appearances in the writings of Charles Dickens, A.E. Housman, and E.B. White), the two words have been called everything from "obsolete" to "vulgar." Our evidence, however, shows that both can be considered standard.
The Word of the Day for June 29 is:
pococurante \POH-koh-kyoo-RAN-tee\ adjective: indifferent, nonchalant
Example sentence:
At the ball, the snobbish debutante offended many would-be suitors by responding to their greetings in a pococurante manner.
Did you know?
The French writer Voltaire carefully named his characters in Candide_ (1759) to create allegories. He appended the prefix "pan-, "meaning "all," to "glossa," the Greek word for "tongue," to name his optimistic tutor "Pangloss," a sobriquet suggesting glibness and talkativeness. Then there is the apathetic Venetian Senator Pococurante, whose name appropriately means "caring little" in Italian. Voltaire's characters did not go unnoticed by later writers. Laurence Sterne used "Pococurante" in part six of _Tristram Shandy_, published three years after Candide_, to mean "a careless person," and Irish poet Thomas Moore first employed the word as an adjective when he described Dublin as a poco-curante place in his memoirs of 1815.
The Word of the Day for June 28 is:
candidate \KAN-duh-dayt\ noun
*1 : one that aspires to or is nominated or qualified for an
office, membership, or award
2 : one likely or suited to undergo or be chosen for something
specified
3 : a student in the process of meeting final requirements for a
degree
Example sentence:
Voters will have several appealing candidates to choose from in
this election.
Did you know?
When a person running for public office in ancient Rome greeted voters in the Forum, the center of judicial and public business, he wore a toga that had been whitened with chalk. As a result, the Latin word for someone seeking office came to be "candidatus," meaning literally "clothed in white." "Candidatus," in turn, comes from the adjective "candidus," meaning "white." "Candidatus" was adopted into English as "candidate" at the beginning of the 17th century.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 27 is:
belie \bih-LYE\ verb
1 a : to give a false impression of b : to present an appearance
not in agreement with
2 a : to show (something) to be false or wrong b : to run counter
to : contradict
*3 : disguise
Example sentence:
Martin's easy banter and relaxed attitude belied his nervousness.
Did you know?
"What is a lie?" asked Lord Byron in Don Juan. He then answered himself: "'Tis but the truth in masquerade...." The history of "belie" illustrates a certain connection between lying and disguising. In its earliest known use, around A.D. 1000, "belie" meant "to deceive by lying." By the 1200s, it was being used to mean "to tell lies about," using a sense similar to that of the modern word "slander." Over time its meaning softened, shifting from an act of outright lying to one of mere misrepresentation, and by the early 1700s, the word was being used in the sense "to disguise or conceal." Nowadays, "belie" suggests giving an impression at variance with the facts rather than telling an intentional untruth.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 26 is:
xeriscape \ZEER-uh-skayp\ noun, often capitalized: a landscaping method developed especially for arid and semiarid
climates that utilizes water-conserving techniques (as the use of drought-tolerant plants, mulch, and efficient irrigation)
Example sentence: Jim is not green-thumbed, so when he relocated to Colorado, he really liked the low-maintenance xeriscape of his new home.
Did you know? "Xeros" is the Greek word for "dry" that is the base for a handful of English words related to mainly dry printing ("xerography") and dry, or xerophilous, habitats and their plants. In the early 1980s, the Greek adjective was used to name a type of landscaping practiced primarily in the arid western regions of the United States. (The Water Department of Denver, Colorado, is credited with the word's coinage.) "Xeriscape," as it is called, uses plants that require little water and techniques that efficiently use water and reduce evapor
The Word of the Day for June 25 is:
fuliginous \fyoo-LIJ-uh-nus\ adjective
1*a : sooty b: obscure, murky
2 : having a dark or dusky color
Example sentence: London was a fuliginous city during the Industrial Revolution.
Did you know? "Fuliginous" is a word with a dark and dirty past -- it derives from "fuligo," the Latin word for "soot." In an early sense (now obsolete), "fuliginous" was used to describe noxious bodily vapors once thought to be produced by organic processes. The "sooty" sense, which English speakers have been using since the early 1620s, can be used to describe everything from dense fogs and malevolent clouds to overworked chimney sweeps. "Fuliginous" can also be used to refer to something dark or dusky, as in Henry James' novel _The Ambassadors_, in which the character Waymarsh is described as having "dark fuliginous eyes."
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 23 is:
lissome \LISS-um\ adjective 1 a : easily flexed *b : lithe
2 : nimble
Example sentence: Even though she hasn't danced in years, Maggie still has the lissome body of a ballerina.
Did you know? "Lissome" (sometimes spelled "lissom") is a gently altered form of its synonym, "lithesome." While "lissome" tends to be the more popular choice these days, the two words have similar pasts. They both appeared in the second half of the 18th century, and they both trace back to the much older "lithe" ("supple" or "graceful"), which first appeared in English during the 14th century and comes from an Old English word meaning "gentle." "Lissome" can also be an adverb meaning "in a supple or nimble manner," but this use is rare.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 22 is:
cineast \SIN-ee-ast\ noun: a devotee of motion pictures; also : moviemaker
Example sentence: Ralph and Tory met -- and fell in love -- at a film festival, and within a year the two cineasts were engaged to be married.
Did you know? "Cineast" is a French borrowing that made its American premiere in the mid-1920s. The French spliced together "cine" and "-aste" to create "cineaste," a word for a filmmaker or movie director. "Cine" in French is just another word for "cinema," and "-aste" is a suffix that appears in words like "gymnaste" and "enthousiaste." "Cineaste" underwent several changes once it was established in English. Some writers anglicized its spelling, shortening "-aste" to "-ast" (although "cineaste" and "cineaste" are also still used). Others began to use "cineast" to mean "film buff," and that's the sense that is most common today. The Word of the Day for June 21 is:
estival \ESS-tuh-vul\
adjective: of or relating to the summer
Example sentence: On summer evenings, Carl would sit for hours on the porch enjoying the warmth of the estival breezes.
Did you know? "Estival" and "festival" look so much alike that you might think they're very closely related, but that isn't the case. "Estival" traces back to "aestas," which is the Latin word for "summer" (and which also gave us "estivate," a verb for spending the summer in a torpid state -- a sort of hot-weather equivalent of hibernation). "Festival" also comes from Latin, but it has a different and unrelated root. It derives from "festivus," a term that means "festive" or "merry." "Festivus" is also the ancestor of "festive" and "festivity" as well as the much rarer "festivous" (which also means "festive") and "infestive," meaning "not merry, mirthless." The Word of the Day for June 20 is:
purview \PER-vyoo\ noun
1 a : the body or enacting part of a statute b : the limit, purpose, or scope of a statute
*2 : the range or limit of authority, competence, responsibility, concern, or intention
3 : range of vision, understanding, or cognizance
Example sentence: The court ruled that the student's T-shirt fell under the purview of the First Amendment.
Did you know? You might guess that there is a connection between "purview" and "view," but the two words are not actually related. "Purview" comes from "purveu," a word often found in the legal statutes of 13th- and 14th-century England. These statutes, written in the Anglo-French, opened with the phrases "purveu est" and "purveu que," which translate literally to "it is provided" and "provided that." "Purveu" derives from "porveu," the past participle of the Old French verb "porveeir," meaning "to provide." "View" derives (via Middle English) from the past participle of another Anglo-French word, "veer," meaning "to see," and ultimately from the Latin "videre," also meaning "to see."
* Indicates the sense illustrated by the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 19 is:
shoestring \SHOO-string\ noun
1 : shoelace
*2 : a small sum of money : capital inadequate or barely adequate to the needs of a transaction
Example sentence: For the first few years, Jillian and Georgia ran the business on a shoestring.
Did you know? In earlier times, wandering peddlers offered townspeople a variety of items and trinkets, such as fabrics, embroidery materials, and even patent medicines. Another popular offering from these traveling salespeople was shoelaces. The fact that such vendors neither earned much money nor charged very much for their wares led to the connection of their literal shoestrings with a metaphorical application of "shoestring" to a very small amount of money. It's still not uncommon to hear of a business being operated on a shoestring (even if these days it's less likely that actual shoelaces are involved), but it's also possible to speak of "traveling on a shoestring" and even "gardening on a shoestring."*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
The Word of the Day for June 18 is:
resplendent \rih-SPLEN-dunt\
adjective : shining brilliantly : characterized by a glowing splendor
Example sentence: Zoo visitors excitedly snapped pictures of the peacock fanning his resplendent tail.
Did you know? "Resplendent" has a lot in common with "splendid" ("shining, brilliant"), "splendent" ("shining, glossy"), and "splendor" ("brightness or luster"). Each of those glowing terms gets its shine from the Latin verb "splendere" ("to shine"). Etymologists believe "splendere" might also be related to Middle Irish "lainn," meaning "bright." "Splendent," "splendor," and "resplendent" first showed their lustrous senses in English during the 15th century, but "splendid" didn't show up until over 175 years later; its earliest known use dates from 1624.
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