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."