Ostensible

 WORD OF THE DAY

ostensible / adjective / ah-STEN-suh-bul

Definition
1a: intended for display
1b: open to view
2a: being such in appearance
2b: plausible rather than demonstrably true or real

Examples
"The Globetrotters … have acquired a loyal following thanks to family-friendly events in which players show off such records-worthy skills and interact with fans while still managing to wallop their ostensible opponents."
— Peter Tonguette, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, 22 Dec. 2021

It's a snarky, glory-thieving place, the world of big-bucks political fund raising. Ostensible grownups can be reduced to screaming toddlers over who gets the credit for bringing in a major donor's gift …
— Viveca Novak, Time, 14 June 1999

Did You Know?
Ostensible comes from Latin ostendere, meaning "to show," and the word suggests a discrepancy between a declared or implied aim or reason and the true one.

Reciprocate

 WORD OF THE DAY

reciprocate / verb / rih-SIP-ruh-kay

Definition
1: to give and take mutually
2: to return in kind or degree
3: to make a return for something
4: to move forward and backward alternately

Examples
"'Our coaches are the type of people you want to play for,' [Brooklyn] Meyer added. 'Like Coach [Ryan] Brasser said in the locker room, the West Lyon girls basketball team isn't just this year's team. It's also past teams and teams in the future.' Brasser reciprocated the compliment, saying that every girl was a quality person, an excellent person and then a good basketball player."
— Zach James, The Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, 3 Mar. 2022

Thus expressing himself, the little lawyer gave Mr. Winkle a poke in the chest, which that gentleman reciprocated; after which they both laughed very loudly …
— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837

Did You Know?
Reciprocate, retaliate, requite, and return all mean "to give back," usually in kind or in quantity.
Reciprocate implies a mutual or equivalent exchange or a paying back of what one has received ("We reciprocated their hospitality by inviting them to our beach house").
Retaliate usually implies a paying back of an injury or offense in exact kind, often vengefully ("She retaliated by spreading equally nasty rumors about them").
Requite implies a paying back according to one's preference, and often not in an equivalent fashion ("He requited her love with cold indifference"). Return implies simply a paying or giving back ("returned their call" or "return good for evil").

Wend

 WORD OF THE DAY

wend / verb / WEND

Definition
1a: to direct one's course
1b: travel
2a: to proceed on (one's way)
2b: direct
3: a member of a Slavic people of eastern Germany

Examples
"While returning to the airport in Amman, wending our way north on Highway 35, we had a chance to reflect on our trip."
— Daniel Rodrigues, The New York Times, 7 Feb. 2022

Assault charges can take a year or two to wend their way through the system, a period during which abuse can continue or worsen.
— New York Times, 24 Nov. 2021

Did You Know?
Wend is related to the verb wind, which means, among other things, "to follow a series of curves and turns."
Wend itself comes from Old English wendan, referring to turning or changing direction or position.
Its use in senses related to going or moving along a course has lent the English verb go its past tense form went (as a past tense form of wend, went has long since been superseded by wended).

Furtive

 WORD OF THE DAY

furtive / adjective / FER-tiv

Definition
1a: done in a quiet and secretive way to avoid being noticed
1b: surreptitious
1c: expressive of stealth
1d: sly
2a: obtained underhandedly
2b: stolen

Examples
"This little fluffy-looking character [a tree creeper] moves upwards on the tree in a jerky, furtive way in a similar way to that of a mouse on the ground. This style of movement gave rise to its common name of 'tree mouse' in parts of the UK."
 — The Southern Star (Ireland), 3 Mar. 2022

Fall's pleasures were furtive, risky, short-lived-buckeye fights,  … the endless recipes for the apples Mrs. Railsbeck asked him to fetch from the cobwebbed crate in the basement.
— Stewart O'Nan, The Names of the Dead, 1996

Did You Know?
Furtive has a shadowy history. It may have slipped into English directly from the Latin furtivus or it may have covered its tracks by arriving via the French furtif.
We aren't even sure how long it has been a part of the English language. The earliest known written uses of furtive are from the early 1600s, but the derived furtively appears in written form as far back as 1490, suggesting that furtive may have been lurking about for a while.
However furtive got into English, its root is the Latin fur, which is related to, and may come from, the Greek phōr (both words mean "thief").
When first used in English, furtive meant "done by stealth," and later also came to mean, less commonly, "stolen."
Whichever meaning you choose, the elusive ancestry is particularly fitting, since a thief must be furtive to avoid getting caught in the act.

Nascent

 WORD OF THE DAY

nascent / adjective / NASS-unt

Definition
: coming or having recently come into existence

Examples
"Mr Menon has co-founded multiple organizations and has invested in over 20 nascent startups in the previous year alone."
— Business World, 2 Mar. 2022

A few centuries late, when the nascent science of geology was gathering evidence for the earth's enormous antiquity, some advocates of biblical literalism revived this old argument for our entire planet.
— Stephen Jay Gould, Granta 16, Summer 1985

Did You Know?
Nascent comes from nascens, the present participle of the Latin verb nasci, which means "to be born."
It is a relative newcomer to the collection of English words that derive from that Latin verb.
In fact, when the word nascent was itself a newborn, in the first quarter of the 17th century, other nasci offspring were already respectably mature.
Nation, native, and nature had been around since the 1300s; innate and natal, since the 1400s.
More recently, we picked up some French descendants of nasci: née in the 1700s and Renaissance in the 1800s.
One of our newer nasci words is perinatology, which was first used in the late 1960s to name the specialized branch of medicine concerned with childbirth.

Limerick

 WORD OF THE DAY

limerick / noun / LIM-uh-rik

Definition
: a light or humorous verse form of five chiefly anapestic verses of which lines 1, 2, and 5 are of three feet and lines 3 and 4 are of two feet with a rhyme scheme of A-A-B-B-A

Examples
"Since m skill at composing haikus is yet to be tested, I thought I would submit a limerick instead…."
— Monte Briggs, The Advocate (Louisiana), 13 Aug. 2021

My colleague Kari Sonde, who explored popcorn-frying the little buggers, recalled that after the recipe was published, one reader submitted a limerick suggesting she be fired.
— Washington Post, 28 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?
A limerick is a short, humorous five-line poem.
While the origin of this type of verse is unknown, some believe that the name limerick comes from the chorus of an 18th-century Irish soldiers' song "Will You Come Up to Limerick?" to which were added impromptu verses.
The Limerick referenced in this chorus is a port city in southwestern Ireland

Gregarious

 WORD OF THE DAY

gregarious / adjective / grih-GAIR-ee-us

Definition
1a: tending to associate with others of one's kind
1b: social
1c: marked by or indicating a liking for companionship
1d: sociable
1e: of or relating to a social group
2a (of a plant): growing in a cluster or a colony
2b: living in contiguous nests but not forming a true colony —used especially of wasps and bees

Examples
"The gregarious organizer of the Florida Renaissance Festival … is a 40-year Fort Lauderdale resident who turns 75 in April and sounds energized enough to slay any dragon who might drop by when the 30-year-old fair kicks off Saturday."
— Ben Crandell, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 3 Feb. 2022

"… the gregarious trade unionist whose back-slapping mateyness helped make him Australia's most popular politician."
— Time, 3 Apr. 1989

Did You Know?
When you're one of the herd, it's tough to avoid being social.
The etymology of gregarious reflects the social nature of the flock; in fact, the word grew out of the Latin noun grex, meaning "herd" or "flock."
 When it first began appearing in English texts in the 17th century, gregarious was applied mainly to animals, but by the 18th century it was being used for social human beings as well.
By the way, grex gave English a whole flock of other words too, including egregious, aggregate, congregate, and segregate.

Cryptography

 WORD OF THE DAY

cryptography / noun / krip-TAH-gruh-fee

Definition
1: secret writing
2a: the enciphering and deciphering of messages in secret code or cipher
2b: the computerized encoding and decoding of information
3: cryptanalysis

Examples
"Cryptocurrency is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units and verify the transfer of assets."
 — Jacob Maslow, The Louisville (Kentucky) Cardinal, 2 Feb. 2022

Crypto legend—as in, cryptography, the original tech usage of the term—and Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike has laid into the NFT/web3 craze, suggesting it’s rife with pyramid schemes.
— David Meyer, Fortune, 10 Jan. 2022

Did You Know?
For a word having to do with secrets, "cryptography" has a surprisingly transparent etymology.
The word traces back to the Greek roots kryptos, meaning "hidden," and graphein, meaning "to write." Kryptos - which in turn traces to the Greek verb kryptein, meaning "to hide" - is a root shared by several English words, including "crypt," "cryptic," and "encrypt."
"Krypton," the name of a colorless gaseous element used especially in some fluorescent lamps and photography flashes, also comes from "kryptos."
The name was chosen because the gas is rare and hard to find.

Archetype

 WORD OF THE DAY

archetype / noun / AHR-kih-type

Definition
1a: the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies
1b: prototype
1c: a perfect example
2: idea
3 (psychology): an inherited idea or mode of thought in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung that is derived from the experience of the race and is present in the unconscious of the individual

Examples
"The contemporary fantasy genre owes its existence to J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings.' In it, Tolkien consolidated and popularized the various fantastical archetypes—like elves, dwarves, and the dark lord—that have since ingrained themselves into humanity's collective cultural psyche."
— Yifei Cheng, The Student Life (Pomona College), 24 Feb. 2022

In popular culture, however, Skyline is the archetype that unofficially represents the Cincinnati collective.
— Michael Casagrande | Mcasagrande@al.com, al, 30 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?
Archetype derives via Latin from the Greek adjective archetypos ("archetypal"), formed from the verb archein ("to begin" or "to rule") and the noun typos ("type").
Archein also gave us the prefix arch-, meaning "principal" or "extreme," used to form such words as archenemy, archduke, and archconservative.)
Archetype has specific uses in the fields of philosophy and psychology.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, for example, believed that all things have ideal forms (aka archetypes) of which real things are merely shadows or copies.
And in the psychology of C. G. Jung, archetype refers to an inherited idea or mode of thought that is present in the unconscious of the individual.
In everyday prose, however, archetype is most commonly used to mean "a perfect example of something."

Tempestuous

 WORD OF THE DAY

tempestuous / adjective / tem-PESS-chuh-wus

Definition
1: of, relating to, or resembling a tempest
2: turbulent, stormy

Examples
"Reigning from c. 1479 until 1458 b.c., Hatshepsut was one of very few female pharaohs in ancient Egypt. Known for her ... tempestuous rise to power…."
— Lily Landau, Cracked, 22 Feb. 2022

Medvedev had a more tempestuous and challenging run to back-to-back Australian Open finals.
— John Pye, chicagotribune.com, 28 Jan. 2022

Did You Know?
Time is sometimes marked in seasons, and seasons are associated with the weather.
This explains how tempus, the Latin word for "time," could have given rise to an English adjective for things turbulent and stormy.
Tempus is the root behind Old Latin tempestus, meaning "season," and Late Latin tempestuosus, the direct ancestor of tempestuous.
As you might expect, tempus is also the root, by way of the Latin tempestas ("season, weather, or storm"), of the noun tempest.
Tempus may also be akin to the Latin verb temperare ("to moderate, mix, or temper"), which made its way through Anglo-French to become the English temper.

Besmirch

WORD OF THE DAY

besmirch / verb / bih-SMERCH

Definition
1: to cause harm or damage to the purity, luster, or beauty of (something)
2: sully, soil

Examples
"In a must-have game for the season, Texas must have had one blown opportunity after another in a contest besmirched with critical personal foul penalties, poor blocking and Thompson's first pick six, a play that completely turned the outcome of the game. And perhaps the season."
— Kirk Bohls, The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, 17 Oct. 2021

And a failure to fulfill the now apparently near-impossible tasks of evacuating all the Afghan translators, workers and fixers on whom the US relied and who now face Taliban retribution would besmirch America’s conscience and global reputation.
— Stephen Collinson, CNN, 16 Aug. 2021

Did You Know?
Since the prefix be- in besmirch means "to make or cause to be," when you besmirch something, you cause it to have a smirch.
What's a smirch? A smirch is a stain, and to smirch something is to stain it or make it dirty. By extension, the verb smirch came to mean "to bring discredit or disgrace on."
Smirch and besmirch, then, mean essentially the same thing.
We have William Shakespeare to thank for the variation in form. His uses of the term in Hamlet:
"And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch the virtue of his will" and Henry V: "Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd with rainy marching in the painful field" are the first known appearances of besmirch in English.

Milieu

 WORD OF THE DAY

milieu / noun / meel-YOO

Definition
1: the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops
2: environment

Examples
"Before the pandemic, a lot of people were focused on how to make a home office sustainable … and that includes not only how the milieu is conducive to productivity, but also how it helps you establish a good work-life balance….."
— Ashlee Piper, quoted in Entrepreneur, 10 Feb. 2022

Theirs was a bohemian milieu in which people often played romantic musical chairs.
— Edmund White, New York Review of Books, 12 Feb. 2009

Did You Know?
Milieu comes from Old French mi (meaning "middle") and lieu ("place").
The word refers to an environment or setting.
In English, lieu also is used to mean "place" and most often occurs in the phrase "in lieu of," as in "Cash is preferred but in lieu of cash a credit card is acceptable."

Compendious

 WORD OF THE DAY

compendious / adjective / kum-PEN-dee-us

Definition
1: marked by brief expression of a comprehensive matter
2: concise and comprehensive

Examples
"But as a far-reaching, compendious and elegantly turned examination of a region and its peoples, this book is unlikely to be surpassed."
 — Mick Brown, The Daily Telegraph (London), 22 Aug. 2020

Another documents the founding in 1974 — by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallaro, Pamela Olin and Julia Stanley — of a compendious and still-growing register of lesbian culture called the Herstory Archives.
— Julianne Mcshane, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019

Did You Know?
Compendious comes from Latin compendium, meaning "saving," "shortcut," and, in its most literal sense, "that which is weighed together."
Compendium has its source in the Latin verb compendere, meaning "to weigh together."

Askew

 WORD OF THE DAY

askew / adjective / uh-SKYOO

Definition
1a: out of line
1b: at an angle

Examples
"Papers were askew, someone had helped themselves to a snack in the kitchen and the suspect's prints were discovered in the fireplace. Worse yet, the culprit, a squirrel, was still in the house."
— CBC News (Canada), 22 Aug. 2020

If there are tree branches askew across a path, it’s probably not the right one.
— Paighten Harkins, The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 July 202

Did You Know?
Askew was formed simply by attaching the prefix a- (meaning "in [such] a state or condition") to skew.
The latter comes from Anglo-French eschiver, meaning "to escape or avoid."

Slough

 WORD OF THE DAY

slough / verb / SLUFF

Definition
1: the cast-off skin of a snake
2: a mass of dead tissue separating from an ulcer
3: something that may be shed or cast off
4a: to become shed or cast off
4b: to cast off one's skin
4c: to separate in the form of dead tissue from living tissue
5: to crumble slowly and fall away
6a: to get rid of or discard as irksome, objectionable, or disadvantageous —usually used with off
6b: to dispose of (a losing card in bridge) by discarding

Examples
"Use the scrub once or twice a week to slough off dead skin cells for smoother skin."
— Lindsay Tigar, The Asheville (North Carolina) Citizen-Times, 23 Jan. 2022

Did You Know?
There are two verbs spelled slough in English, as well as two nouns, and both sets have different pronunciations.
The first noun, referring to a swamp or a discouraged state of mind, is pronounced to rhyme with either blue or cow; it derives from Old English slōh, which is akin to a Middle High German slouche, meaning "ditch."
Its related verb, which can mean "to plod through mud," has the same pronunciation.
The second noun, pronounced to rhyme with cuff, refers to the shed skin of a snake (as well as anything else that has been cast off).
Its related verb describes the action of shedding or eliminating something, just like a snake sheds its skin.
This slough derives from Middle English slughe and is distantly related to slūch, a Middle High German word meaning "snakeskin."

Opine

 WORD OF THE DAY

opine / verb / oh-PYNE

Definition
intransitive verb: to express opinions
transitive verb: to state as an opinion

Examples
"Apple's purpose has always been to empower the users of its wares. 'People are inherently creative. They will use tools in ways the toolmakers never thought possible,' once opined Steve Jobs, the computer maker's late co-founder."
— The Economist, 27 Nov. 2021

So that piece of the federal lawsuit can proceed, although one possibility is that a lower court will now ask the state judiciary to opine on whether this is a correct reading of Texas law.
— The Editorial Board, WSJ, 10 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?
Opine is not a back-formation of opinion. Both words come from Middle French opiner, meaning "to express one's opinion," and Latin opīnārī, "to have in mind" or "to think."
And they were thought up as words for the English language independently at different times.

Prosaic

 WORD OF THE DAY

prosaic / adjective / proh-ZAY-ik

Definition
1a: characteristic of prose as distinguished from poetry
1b: factual
1c: dull, unimaginative
2: everyday, ordinary

Examples
"Most of these phenomena turn out to have prosaic explanations—such as weather balloons, space debris and atmospheric effects in the sky…."
— Dillon Guthrie, The Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch, 4 Jan. 2022

The dark fantasy of Armageddon distracts from the more prosaic and obvious necessity to uphold the law and establish political and legal accountability for those who encourage others to defy it.
— Fintan O’toole, The Atlantic, 16 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?
In the past, any text that was not poetic was prosaic. Back then, prosaic carried no negative connotations; it simply indicated that a written work was made up of prose.
That sense clearly owes much to the meaning of the word's Latin source prosa, meaning "prose."
Poetry is viewed, however, as the more beautiful, imaginative, and emotional type of writing, and prose was relegated to the status of mundane and plain-Jane.
As a result, English speakers started using prosaic to refer to anything considered matter-of-fact or ordinary, and they gradually transformed it into a synonym for "colorless," "drab," "lifeless," and "lackluster."