Dander

WORD OF THE DAY

dander / noun / DAN-der

Definition
1a: dandruff
1b: minute scales from hair, feathers, or skin that may be allergenic
2: anger, temper

Examples
"Unlike traditional vacuum cleaners made to handle a wider range of different messes, these next-level vacuums for pet hair are engineered to sweep away all of the stubborn pet fur…, allowing you to quickly de-fuzz your stuff and keep dander under control."
— Korin Miller, The Daily Beast, 8 Apr. 2022

The Greenote Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is complete with 200 watts of power, drumming up 23,000 pascals of suction power to efficiently absorb everything from dust and debris to pet dander and hair.
— Amy Schulman, PEOPLE.com, 6 Mar. 2022

Did You Know?
How did dander acquire its "temper" sense? Etymologists have come up with a few possibilities, but nothing is known for sure.
Some experts have proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that the meaning stems from the image of an angry person tearing out his or her hair by the fistful, scattering dandruff in the process.
Some think it may come from a West Indian word dander, which refers to a kind of ferment and suggests "rising" anger (in English, ferment can mean either "an agent capable of causing fermentation" or "a state of unrest or excitement").
Yet another proposed possibility is that the "anger" sense was imported to America by early Dutch colonists and is from their phrase op donderen, meaning "to burst into a sudden rage."