Comminute

WORD OF THE DAY

comminute / verb / KAH-muh-noot

Definition
1: to reduce to minute particles
2: pulverize

Examples
"Type III fractures are comminuted (involve multiple broken pieces of bone), which lead to mechanical blocks to motion and significant elbow joint and ligament damage. Surgery would be required to fix or remove the broken pieces of bone and repair the soft-tissue damage."
— Joshua Dines, Forbes.com, 21 Oct. 2018

"… the USDA says all cooked sausages (including bologna and hot dogs) must be comminuted, or 'reduced to minute particles.'"
— Emily Petsko, Mental Floss, 24 Oct. 2018

Did You Know?
What do comminute, pulverize, and triturate all have in common? All three words are derived from Latin and share the meaning "to reduce to small particles." Comminute can be traced back to the prefix com- and the verb minuere, meaning "to lessen."
Pulverize descends from a combination of pulver-, meaning "dust" or "powder," with the suffix -izare, which—like the English -ize—can mean "to cause to be."
Triturate is borrowed from the past participle of the Latin triturare, which means "to thresh." Triturate specifically refers to the use of rubbing or grinding to achieve pulverization, a process which could be said to resemble the use of rubbing to separate grains from harvested cereal plants.

Polyglot

WORD OF THE DAY

polyglot / adjective / PAH-lee-glaht

Definition
1a: speaking or writing several languages
1b: multilingual
1c: composed of numerous linguistic groups
2: containing matter in several languages
3: composed of elements from different languages
4: widely diverse (as in ethnic or cultural origins)

Examples
With vacationers arriving from all over Europe and other parts of the world, merchants in the resort city must adjust to serving a polyglot clientele.

"Learning the basics of any language is a quick task. Programmes like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone can guide you through a few greetings and simple phrases at lightning speed. For a more personal experience, polyglot Timothy Doner recommends reading and watching material that you already have an interest in. 'If you like cooking, buy a cookbook in a foreign language; if you like soccer, try watching a foreign game,' he says."
— Peter Rubinstein and Bryan Lufkin, BBC.com, 19 Feb. 2019

Did You Know?
You've probably run across the prefix poly- before—it comes from Greek and means "many" or "multi-." But what about -glot? That part of the word comes from the Greek term glōtta, meaning "language" or "tongue." (Glōtta is also the source of glottis, the word for the space between the vocal cords.)
Polyglot itself entered English in the 17th century, both as an adjective and as a noun meaning "one who can write or speak several languages." You could call the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V a polyglot. He claimed that he addressed his horse only in German, he conversed with women in Italian and with men in French, but reserved Spanish for his talks with God.

Magniloquent

WORD OF THE DAY

magniloquent / adjective / mag-NIL-uh-kwunt

Definition
: speaking in or characterized by a high-flown often bombastic style or manner

Examples
The magniloquent sportscaster sometimes got so carried away with his monologues that he would forget to describe the action on the field.

"It [the television series Billions] features two outsize, magniloquent protagonists who are constant foils to one another: light and dark, good and evil, both cut from the same ambitious cloth and therefore destined to lock in an endless pas de deux of power."
— Rachel Syme, The New Republic, 1 May 2018

Did You Know?
Magnus means "great" in Latin; loqui is a Latin verb meaning "to speak." Combine the two and you get magniloquus, the Latin predecessor of magniloquent.
English-speakers started using magniloquent in the 1600s—even though we have had its synonym grandiloquent since the 1500s.
*Grandiloquent comes from Latin grandiloquus, which combines loqui and grandis, another word for "great" in Latin.)
Today, these synonyms continue to exist side by side and to be used interchangeably, though grandiloquent is the more common of the two.

Decoct

WORD OF THE DAY

decoct / verb / dih-KAHKT

Definition

1: to extract the flavor of by boiling

2: boil down, concentrate

Examples

"Though the taste is a bonus, the real draw in this caffeine-free latte is the CBD, or cannabidiol, oil. The CBD served in the lattes is derived from Kentucky-grown hemp, decocted from the flowers and leaves with hot dairy or coconut milk." 

— Mackensy Lunsford, The Asheville (North Carolina) Citizen-Times, 2 Mar. 2018

"The cooking liquor he decocts from roasted red peppers … gives surprising oomph to roasted rice purée and royal red potato." 

— Lee Tran Lam, The Gourmet Traveller, 3 Jan. 2018

Did You Know?

Decoct boils down to a simple Latin origin: the word decoquere, from de-, meaning "down" or "away," and coquere, meaning "to cook" or "to ripen." 

Decoct itself is somewhat rare. Its related noun decoction, which refers to either an extract obtained by decocting or the act or process of decocting, is slightly more common but still much less recognizable than some other members of the coquere family, among gastronomical words like biscuit, biscotti, cook, and kitchen. 

Other coquere descendants include concoct ("to prepare by combining raw materials" or "to devise or fabricate"), concoction ("something concocted"), and precocious ("exceptionally early in development or occurrence" or "exhibiting mature qualities at an unusually early age").

Bower

WORD OF THE DAY

bower / noun / BOW-er

Definition
1: an attractive dwelling or retreat
2: a lady's private apartment in a medieval hall or castle
3a: a shelter (as in a garden) made with tree boughs or vines twined together
3b: arbor

Examples
The couple's rendezvous was a secluded bower in the garden.

"In retelling Shakespeare's story of mortal and immortal lovers lost in a bewitched Athenian wood, Ms. Taymor has sought to conjure the sort of Jungian visions that are bred in the fertile fields of sleep. … [S]he transforms bed and bedding into a sylvan, starry wonderland. An immense sheet rises, falls and twists itself to become a confining roof, a vast sky, a writhing forest floor and an amorous bower fit for a queen of the fairies."
— Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 4 Nov. 2013

Did You Know?
Bower derives from Old English būr, meaning "dwelling,"and was originally used of attractive homes or retreats, especially rustic cottages.
In the Middle Ages, bower came to refer to a lady's personal hideaway within a medieval castle or hall—that is, her private apartment. The more familiar "arbor" sense combines the pastoral beauty of a rustic retreat with the privacy of a personal apartment.
Although its tranquil modern meaning belies it, bower is distantly related to the far more roughshod bowery, which has historically been used as the name of a sleazy district in New York City.
The Bowery got its name from a Dutch term for a dwelling or farm that shares a common ancestor with the terms that gave rise to "bower."

Purview

WORD OF THE DAY

purview / noun / pER-vyoo

Definition
1a: the body or enacting part of a statute
1b: 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

Examples
"The Supreme Court had ruled that the House has purview over ordering a new election…."
— Dan Haar, The New Haven (Connecticut) Register, 13 Feb. 2019

"In getting the role of president of NBC Entertainment's Alternative and Reality Group, [Meredith] Ahr now commands one of the biggest unscripted portfolios in television. Adding the network to her purview means that she also will be the executive overseeing TV's two biggest reality properties, America's Got Talent and The Voice."
— Michael O'Connell, Hollywoodreporter.com, 19 Nov. 2018

Did You Know?
You might guess that there is a connection between purview and view. Purview comes from purveu, a word often found in the legal statutes of 13th- and 14th-century England.
These statutes, written in 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 Latin vidēre, of the same meaning.

Hamartia

WORD OF THE DAY

hamartia / noun / hah-mahr-TEE-uh

Definition
1: a flaw in character that brings about the downfall of the hero of a tragedy
2: tragic flaw

Examples
Greed was the hamartia that ultimately brought down the protagonist.

"Characters in Greek tragedies usually had a hamartia, or fatal flaw. Hubris, pride, presumption and arrogance were some of the chief character traits that brought down peasants and emperors alike."
— Christine Barnes, The Tallahassee (Florida) Democrat, 6 May 2010

Did You Know?
Hamartia arose from the Greek verb hamartanein, meaning "to miss the mark" or "to err."
Aristotle introduced the term in the Poetics to describe the error of judgment which ultimately brings about the tragic hero's downfall. As you can imagine, the word is most often found in literary criticism.
However, media writers occasionally employ the word when discussing the unexplainable misfortune or missteps of celebrities regarded as immortal gods and goddesses before being felled by their own shortcomings.
For example, a writer for The New Republic in an April 2018 review of Chappaquiddick (a movie about U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy) comments that "Kennedy's ruthlessness and ambition, which are treated as the family's hamartia in Chappaquiddick, are swept under the rug of his compassion."

Canker

WORD OF THE DAY

canker / verb / KANG-ker

Definition
1: to become infested with erosive or spreading sores
2: to corrupt the spirit of
3: to become corrupted

Examples
"Nevertheless, the self-absorption into which the lovers fall and the death and transfiguration with which the action ends have often been thought of as symptoms of a disease that cankers the human condition."
— Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero, 2004

"They want to talk. They want to get it off their chest. Some people have been holding onto these things for years, just cankering their soul, but they don't know where to say it."
— Shannon Hale, quoted in The Deseret News, 12 Mar. 2018

Did You Know?
Canker is commonly known as the name for a type of spreading sore that eats into the tissue—a use that obviously furnished the verb with both its medical and figurative senses.
The word ultimately traces back to Latin cancer, which can refer to a crab or a malignant tumor. T
he Greeks have a similar word, karkinos, and according to the ancient Greek physician Galen, the tumor got its name from the way the swollen veins surrounding the affected part resembled a crab's limbs.
Cancer was adopted into Old English, becoming canker in Middle English and eventually shifting in meaning to become a general term for ulcerations. Cancer itself was reintroduced to English later, first as a zodiacal word and then as a medical term.

Orthography

WORD OF THE DAY

orthography / noun / or-THAH-gruh-fee

Definition
1a: the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage
1b: the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
2: a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling

Examples
English orthography was not yet regularized in William Shakespeare's time, so words often had many different spellings.

"He had to finish his thesis … before leaving for a research job in Australia, where he planned to study aboriginal languages. I asked him to assess our little experiment. 'The grammar was easy,' he said. 'The orthography is a little difficult, and the verbs seemed chaotic.'"
— Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 3 Sept. 2018

Did You Know?
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!" That quote, ascribed to Andrew Jackson, might have been the motto of early English spelling.
The concept of orthography (a term that derives from the Greek words orthos, meaning "right or true," and graphein, meaning "to write") was not something that really concerned people until the introduction of the printing press in England in the second half of the 15th century.
From then on, English spelling became progressively more uniform and has remained fairly stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such as changing musick to music, that were championed by Noah Webster).

Parabolic

WORD OF THE DAY

parabolic / adjective / pair-uh-BAH-lik

Definition
1a: expressed by or being a parable
1b: allegorical
2: of, having the form of, or relating to a curve formed by the intersection of a cone and a plane parallel to an element of the cone

Examples
The batter launched the ball into a towering parabolic arc that carried it well over the center field fence.

"In 1937, [radio astronomer Grote] Reber built the world's first parabolic radio telescope in his backyard. The Reber Telescope was moved to the National Radio Observatory at Green Bank in the 1960s and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989."
— Princeton Times (West Virginia), 21 Dec. 2018

Did You Know?
The two distinct meanings of parabolic trace back to the development of Late Latin and New Latin. Late Latin is the Latin language used by writers in the third to sixth centuries. In that language, the word for "parable" was parabola—hence, the "parable" sense of parabolic.
New Latin refers to the Latin used since the end of the medieval period, especially in regard to scientific description and classification. In New Latin, parabola names the same geometrical curve as it does in English.
Both meanings of parabola were drawn from the Greek word for "comparison": parabolē.

Sentient

WORD OF THE DAY

sentient / adjective / SEN-shee-unt

Definition
1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
2a: having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge 
2b: aware
3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling

Examples
"Frightened of the potential that a vast automated intelligence represents, we often portray sentient intelligences as the equivalent of machine gods—ones that, in many cases, find us wanting." 
— Mark Hachman, PC Magazine, 15 Apr. 2013

"Diana's hippie-Wiccan aunts … live in one of the tale's more charming inventions: a funky, sentient house that rattles the crockery when it's irritated and supplies flashbacks by conjuring up life-size holographic scenes in situ." 
— Mike Hale, The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2019

Did You Know?
You may have guessed that sentient has something to do with the senses. The initial spelling sent- or sens- is often a giveaway for such a meaning. 
A sentient being is one who perceives and responds to sensations of whatever kind—sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. 
Sentient ultimately comes from the Latin verb sentire, which means "to feel" or "to perceive," and is related to the noun sensus, meaning "sense." 
A few related English words are sentiment and sentimental, which have to do with emotions, sensual, which relates to more physical sensations, and the trio of assent, consent, and dissent, which involve one's expressions of agreement (or disagreement in the case of dissent) in thought and feeling with another.

Animadversion

WORD OF THE DAY

animadversion / noun / an-uh-mad-VER-zhun

Definition

1: a critical and usually censorious remark — often used with on

2: adverse criticism

Examples

"Some of his contemporaries and erstwhile friends, meanwhile, displayed considerable frankness in what they wrote. They did not count on Hemingway reading their animadversions on his character and talents while sitting in a café in Venice." 

— Norman Birnbaum, The Nation, 19 Dec. 2011

"If any grudge-bearing customer is equipped to voice his uncalled-for animadversions, why should restaurants not seize the opportunity to speak for themselves—to articulate the counterpoint or impress upon would-be diners a voice of their own? Instagram has emerged as the go-to platform for restauranteurs, unsurprisingly: there's no better way to sell food than with alluring photographs of the dishes you're selling." 

— Calum Marsh, The National Post, 4 Aug. 2016

Did You Know?

Animadversion comes ultimately from the Latin phrase animum advertere, meaning "to turn the mind to." 

The first part, anima, comes from the Latin word for "mind" or "soul" and gives us animal and animate. It is easy to see how we also get adverse and adversary from advertere, especially when we remember that "to turn to" easily becomes "to turn against." 

Other English words descended from advertere include advert, meaning "to turn the attention (to)" or "to make reference (to)," and advertise.

Newspeak

WORD OF THE DAY

newspeak / noun, often capitalized / NOO-speek

Definition

: propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings

Examples

"Remember that in 1984, totalitarian newspeak is created not through elaborate sentences and jargon, but through cutting words out of the dictionary and simplifying grammar. Clear, transparent writing can be used for propaganda purposes as easily as can convoluted prose—and maybe even more easily." 

— Noah Berlatsky, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 July 2011

"He'd lost his birthplace after the Yalta agreement, when his native region was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Since his family was Polish, they decided to join thousands of other 'repatriates' and re-settle in the area in Poland that the communists' newspeak labeled 'the Recovered Territories.'" 

— Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, American Scholar, Summer 2010

Did You Know?

The term newspeak was coined by George Orwell in his 1949 anti-utopian novel 1984. 

In Orwell's fictional totalitarian state, Newspeak was a language favored by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell's words, "designed to diminish the range of thought." Newspeak was characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another, the interchangeability of parts of speech, and the creation of words for political purposes. 

The word has caught on in general use to refer to confusing or deceptive bureaucratic jargon.

Delate

WORD OF THE DAY

delate / verb / dih-LAYT

Definition

1 : accuse, denounce

2 : report, relate

Examples

Hepzibah was brought to trial after being delated for the practice of witchcraft.

"Persons who are delated must first swear to tell the truth concerning themselves and others; if they confess, the judge proceeds accordingly." 

— H. Ansgar Kelly, Speculum, October 2019

Did You Know?

To delate someone is to "hand down" that person to a court of law. In Latin, delatus is the unlikely-looking past participle of deferre, meaning "to bring down, report, or accuse," which in turn comes from ferre, meaning "to carry." 

Not surprisingly, our word defer, meaning "to yield to the opinion or wishes of another," can also be traced back to deferre. At one time, in fact, defer and delate had parallel meanings (both could mean "to carry down or away" or "to offer for acceptance"), but those senses are now obsolete. äToday, you are most likely to encounter delate or its relatives delation and delator in the context of medieval tribunals, although the words can also relate to modern ecclesiastical tribunals.

Bathetic

WORD OF THE DAY

bathetic / adjective / buh-THET-ik

Definition

: characterized by triteness or sentimentalism

Examples

"The TV people inevitably reduce history to a series of bathetic tropes: the flag waving in slow motion, the rescued puppy, the evacuee given the star treatment of American Idol." 

— Matthew Power, Harper's, December 2005

”A vein of knowingness runs through it, a gently comic self-portrait of a lost soul out of time, as when Pierce casts himself in the bathetic role of a 'lonely rock and roller' hankering to hear Big Star on the radio." 

— Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, The Financial Times, 7 Sept. 2018

Did You Know?

When English speakers turned apathy into apathetic in the late 17th century, using the suffix -etic to turn the noun into the adjective, they were inspired by pathetic, the adjectival form of pathos, from Greek pathētikos.

People also applied that bit of linguistic transformation to coin bathetic. English speakers added the suffix -etic to bathos, the Greek word for "depth," which in English has come to mean "triteness" or "excessive sentimentalism." 

The result: the ideal adjective for the incredibly commonplace or the overly sentimental.

Shard

WORD OF THE DAY

shard / noun / SHAHRD

Definition
1a: a piece or fragment of a brittle substance; broadly
1b: a small piece or part : scrap
1c: shell, scale; especially
1d: elytron
2: a fragment of a pottery vessel found on sites and in refuse deposits where pottery-making peoples have lived
3: highly angular curved glass fragments of tuffaceous sediment

Examples
There were shards of glass on the floor where the burglars had broken into the building the night before.

"Some 2,600 years ago, in the land of ancient Israel, a military official inked a request onto the reverse side of a pottery shard: 'If there is any wine, send [quantity].' Archaeologists found the shard in the 1960s, but the boozy inscription, which had faded to near invisibility, went unnoticed for decades."
— Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 22 June 2017

Did You Know?
Shard dates back to Old English (where it was spelled sceard), and it is related to the Old English word scieran, meaning "to cut."
English speakers have adopted the modernized shard spelling for most uses, but archeologists prefer to spell the word sherd when referring to the ancient fragments of pottery they unearth.
Other specialized uses of the word shard include a sense referring to the thick front wings in beetles that protect a hind pair of wings and another sense used for the highly angular curved glass fragments of a type of volcanic rock formation.

Vox populi

WORD OF THE DAY

vox populi / noun / VOKS-POP-yoo-lye

Definition
: popular sentiment

Examples
"As has increasingly been the case in the six years since officials instituted a fan-voting component in 2012, acts ultimately chosen for induction also strongly reflect the vox populi: Def Leppard won that balloting this year, collecting more than 500,000 votes among the total of 3.3 million entered in the fan competition."
— Randy Lewis, The Los Angeles Times, 13 Dec. 2018

"While the Academy is certainly no stranger to controversy, they surely don't want to court it openly with hires that turn out to be less than ideal. Not to mention, the Academy Awards on the whole have become subject to somewhat of a critical reevaluation by the vox populi."
— Mike Reyes, Cinema Blend, 11 Jan. 2019

Did You Know?
Vox populi is a Latin phrase that literally translates as "the voice of the people."
It can be found in the longer maxim, Vox populi, vox Dei, which means "The voice of the people is the voice of God."
Many people think that expression means that the people are always right, but it really implies that the will of the masses—right or wrong—is often irresistible.
Since the mid-20th century, English speakers, especially British ones, have trimmed vox populi down to the abbreviated form vox pop, an expression used particularly for popular opinion as it is used and expressed by the media.

Abecedarian

WORD OF THE DAY

abecedarian / adjective / ay-bee-see-DAIR-ee-un

Definition
1a: of or relating to the alphabet
1b: alphabetically arranged
2: rudimentary

Examples
The children recited an abecedarian chant, beginning with "A is for apple" and ending with "Z is for zebra."

"Aficionados of Sue Grafton's popular detective novels starring Kinsey Millhone will not be disappointed by S is for Silence, Grafton's 19th book in her abecedarian series launched in 1982 with A is for Alibi."
— Jan Collins, The State (Columbia, South Carolina), 11 Dec. 2005

Did You Know?
The history of abecedarian is as simple as ABC—literally. The term's Late Latin ancestor, abecedārius (which meant "alphabetical"), was created as a combination of the letters A, B, C, and D, plus the adjective suffix -arius; you can hear the echo of that origin in the pronunciation of the English term (think "ABC-darian").
In its oldest documented English uses in the early 1600s, abecedarian was a noun meaning "one learning the rudiments of something"; it specifically referred to someone who was learning the alphabet.
The adjective began appearing in English texts a few decades after the noun.

Leviathan

WORD OF THE DAY

leviathan / noun luh-/ VYE-uh-thun

Definition
1a (often capitalized Leviathan): a sea monster defeated by Yahweh in various scriptural accounts
1b: a large sea animal
2 (capitalized Leviathan): the political state; especially
2B: a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy
3 : something large or formidable

Examples
"Fossils of the ancient leviathan were unearthed from 480-million-year-old rocks exposed on a hillside in southeastern Morocco."
— Sid Perkins, Science, 11 Mar. 2015

"… [T]he extension of the Star Wars story has been the biggest global movie phenomenon since Avatar…. It is a leviathan, totaling nearly $4.5 billion in global ticket sales and an entire subcultural media industry."
— Sean Fennessey, The Ringer, 25 May 2018

Did You Know?
Old Testament references to a huge sea monster, Leviathan (in Hebrew, Liwyāthān), are thought to spring from an ancient myth in which the god Baal slays a multiheaded sea monster.
Leviathan appears in the book of Psalms as a sea serpent that is killed by God and then given as food to creatures in the wilderness, and it is referred to in the book of Job as well.
We began equating Leviathan with the political state after the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the word in (and as the title of) his 1651 political treatise on government. Today, Leviathan often suggests a crushing political bureaucracy.
Leviathan can also be immensely useful as a general term meaning "something monstrous or of enormous size."

Feisty

WORD OF THE DAY

feisty / adjective / FYE-stee

Definition

chiefly Southern US and Midland US

1a: full of nervous energy 

1b: fidgety  

1c: touchy, quarrelsome  

1d: exuberantly frisky

2a: having or showing a lively aggressiveness 

2b: spunky

Examples

"She's feisty. She's bawdy. She's bodacious.... She's a bit of a wild child." 

— Vicki Lawrence, quoted in The New York Magazine, 5 Oct. 2018

"The rise of satellite and cable technology in the nineties created new possibilities for nationally syndicated programs built around feisty, voice-driven pundits." 

— Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2018

Did You Know?

In certain parts of the United States, most notably the South, the noun feist (pronounced to rhyme with heist) refers to a small dog used in hunting small game animals (such as squirrels). 

Also spelled fice or fyce, it comes from an obsolete term, "fisting hound," that derived from another obsolete term, fist, a verb that once meant "to break wind." 

The term feisty has come a long way from its flatulent origin, but its small-dog association still seems relevant: the term conveys the spunk and determination that one may associate with a dog that manages to make its presence known (either through its bark or its bite) despite its small size.

Gormless

WORD OF THE DAY

gormless / adjective / GORM-lus

Definition
chiefly British!
1a: lacking intelligence
1b: stupid

Examples
"It would be difficult to think of many things more gormless than driving a car while blindfolded…."
— Fergus Kelly, The Express, 16 Jan. 2019

"On screen, Laurel played gormless underling to Hardy's finicky little king. Off screen, though, the roles were reversed. Laurel co-directed the pictures and devised the bulk of the gags."
— Xan Brooks, The Guardian, 4 Jan. 2019

Did You Know?
Gormless began life as the English dialect word gaumless, which was altered to the modern spelling when it expanded into wider use in the late 19th century.
The origins of gaumless are easy to understand; the word derives from a combination of the dialect noun gaum, meaning "attention" or "understanding," and the suffix -less.
This gaum has a related verb, also limited to dialect use, meaning "to pay attention to" and "to understand."
Perhaps surprisingly, the four-letter gaum has multiple additional dialectal uses that are etymologically unrelated to these.
Also noun-and-verb pairs, gaum means "a sticky or greasy mess" and "to smudge or smear especially with something sticky or greasy," as well as "a stupid doltish person" and "to behave in a stupid or awkward manner."
Use of all of these pales in comparison to that of gormless, however, which is most frequently seen in British English.