Impawn

Word of the Day for Sunday, March 31, 2013

Impawn \im-PAWN\, verb:

1. to put in pawn; pledge.
2. to put in pawn; pledge.

Go to the king; and let there be impawn'd Some surety for a safe return again
-- William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, 1591

A wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide beforehand what he shall do in a given extreme event.
-- Elizabeth P. Peabody, Aesthetic Papers, 2005

And yet, God knows, I dare and I will boldly impawn his temper, that he dares meet and cooperate until we are assayed and proven.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

Impawn entered English in the late 1500s from the Old French pan meaning "pledge" or "security."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Swivet

Word of the Day for Friday, March 29, 2013

Swivet \SWIV-it\, noun:

a state of nervous excitement, haste, or anxiety; flutter: I was in such a swivet that I could hardly speak.

This sent her into a larger swivet, but its ferocity now didn't faze Susan. She now knew the deal.
-- Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming, 2010

Benny had warned Patsy about this; the mother, he said, was in a swivet about the plea.
-- Michelle Huneven, Blame, 2010

Swivet is of unknown origin. While American English speakers started using this term in the late 1800s, it didn’t cross the pond to the UK until the 1920s.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Tranche

Word of the Day for Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Tranche \trahnch, trahnsh\, noun:

1. any part, division, or installment: We've hired the first tranche of researchers.
2. Finance. a. one part or division of a larger unit, as of an asset pool or investment: The loan will be repaid in three tranches. b. a group of securities that share a certain characteristic and form part of a larger offering: The second tranche of the bond issue has a five-year maturity.

verb:
1. Finance. to divide into parts: tranched debt; A credit portfolio can be tranched into a variety of components that are then further subdivided.

All this committee was being asked to approve was to release a further tranche of funding…
-- Stephen Baxter, Exultant, 2005

Seated on deck, where freezing conditions assured him of privacy, he sifted through a third tranche of newspapers and noticed a hardening of attitudes as well as an ebbing of interest.
-- Robert Goddard, Into the Blue, 2006

Tranche unsurprisingly shares a root with trench. Both words come from the Old French trenchier meaning "to cut." While this term first entered English in the sixteenth century, it was 450 years before tranche took on its financial senses.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Marmoreal

Word of the Day for Monday, March 25, 2013

Marmoreal \mahr-MAWR-ee-uhl, -MOHR-\, adjective:

of or like marble: skin of marmoreal smoothness.

Under the white banner of Andrew there was Renaul, and true love, and the ancient Greeks, with their lofty rhetoric and marmoreal beauty…
-- Daniel Mendelsohn, "The American Boy," The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2013

Then she sank back into her immobility and marmoreal silence.
-- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831

First appearing in English in the late 1700s, marmoreal comes from the Latin term marmoreus, which literally means "of marble."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Daven

Word of the Day for Sunday, March 24, 2013

Daven \DAH-vuhn\, verb:

to pray.

There, day or night, everyone — the men, the women, even the children — could daven nonstop.
-- Erica Lann-Clark, "The Goats Know the Way," The Healing Heart, 2003

Every morning he wakes early to daven outside, facing Jerusalem. When I watch him from the window, I regret having taught him to sound out the Hebrew letters when he was only five.
-- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Daven entered English in the mid-nineteenth century from Yiddish.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Preterition

Word of the Day for Saturday, March 23, 2013

Preterition \pret-uh-RISH-uhn\, noun:

1. the act of passing by or over; omission; disregard.
2. Law. the passing over by a testator of an heir otherwise entitled to a portion.
3. Calvinistic Theology. the passing over by God of those not elected to salvation or eternal life.
4. Rhetoric. paralipsis.

He had no innate sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things that made human beings' misfortunes significant to one another.
-- David Foster Wallace, Oblivion, 2004

I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor.
-- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 1977

From the Latin stem praeterit- meaning "to go past," preterition first entered English at the turn of the sixteenth century. While the rhetorical and theological senses were present from the beginning, it took another 100 years for the legal sense to arise in the English language.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Serpentine

Word of the Day for Friday, March 22, 2013

Serpentine \SUR-puhn-teen, -tahyn\, adjective:

1. having a winding course, as a road; sinuous.
2. of, characteristic of, or resembling a serpent, as in form or movement.
3. shrewd, wily, or cunning.

noun:
1. a device on a harquebus lock for holding the match.
2. a cannon having any of various bore sizes, used from the 15th to the 17th century.
3. Skating. a school figure made by skating two figure eights that share one loop.

And meanwhile she looked at me with diamond eyes and wanted me to watch, wanted our two gazes also to proceed along serpentine and continuous paths.
-- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 1981

On wet days, such was the power of habit over him, he rose from his chair at the same hour, and paced his study for the same length of time, pausing now and then to straighten some book in the bookcase, or alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece.
-- Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, 1919

Serpentine made its way into English in the 1400s from the French serpentin. This term ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European word serp, which describes the creeping motion of a snake.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Primaveral

Word of the Day for Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Primaveral \prahy-muh-VEER-uhl\, adjective:

of, in, or pertaining to the early springtime: primaveral longings to sail around the world.

Yet could it ever be truly recaptured, the former primaveral joy?
-- Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 1996

Yesterday I saw a horseman chase through a countryside exploding with primaveral verdure, and if I'd brought a lute along, on my Sunday walk that led me past an imposing chateau I'd once, so and so many years ago, "patrolled" as a recruit, I would have joyously sung out across the treetops, to the solitary, beautiful cinquecento edifice, some such words as "Behind which casement seekest thou, angel, thy repose?"
-- Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose, 1932

Primaveral hails from the Latin prima vera, literally meaning "springtime." This word shares its root with the Italian noodle dish, pasta primavera: pasta served with fresh vegetables.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Hypothecate

Word of the Day for Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Hypothecate \hahy-POTH-i-keyt, hi-\, verb:

1. to pledge to a creditor as security without delivering over; mortgage.
2. to put in pledge by delivery, as stocks given as security for a loan.

Then you hypothecate your stock in company number one, and you had your dummy directors lend you more money, and you buy another trust company.
-- Upton Sinclair, The Moneychangers, 1920

He could buy certificates of city loan for the sinking-fund up to any reasonable amount, hypothecate them where he pleased, and draw his pay from the city without presenting a voucher.
-- Theodor Dreiser, The Financier, 1912

Hypothecate first entered English in the late 1600s, originally from the Greek roots hypo- and tithenai meaning "to put down."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Qualm

Word of the Day for Monday, March 18, 2013

Qualm \kwahm, kwawm\, noun:

1. an uneasy feeling or pang of conscience as to conduct; compunction: He has no qualms about lying.
2. a sudden feeling of apprehensive uneasiness; misgiving: a sudden qualm about the success of the venture.
3. a sudden sensation or onset of faintness or illness, especially of nausea.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

“Uh nuh nuh nuh,” Bosco told her, wagging a finger as if she'd spoken this rogue qualm aloud.
-- Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010

The etymology of qualm is uncertain. It may come from the Old English cwealm, which means "torment," "pain," and "injury," but scholars believe there is not enough evidence to assume a direct connection between these terms.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Sundry

Word of the Day for Sunday, March 17, 2013

Sundry \SUHN-dree\, adjective:

various or diverse: sundry persons.

The early counts in the indictment will be thrown out: they concern sundry words spoken, at sundry times, about the act and the oath, and More's treasonable conspiracy with Fisher—letters went between the two of them, but it seems those letters are now destroyed.
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, 2009

He looked like an Italian, was dressed like an Englishman, and had the independent air of an American—a combination which caused sundry pairs of feminine eyes to look approvingly after him, and sundry dandies in black velvet suits, with rose-coloured neckties, buff gloves, and orange flowers in their buttonholes, to shrug their shoulders, and then envy him his inches.
-- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868

Sundry first appeared in English before the year 900. It is derived from the Old English syndrig meaning "separate," "apart," and "special." While sundi and sundrie were acceptable spellings between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, since then they have fallen out of use in favour of sundry.

Prolepsis

Word of the Day for Saturday, March 16, 2013

Prolepsis \proh-LEP-sis\, noun:

1. Rhetoric. the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance.
2. the assigning of a person, event, etc., to a period earlier than the actual one; the representation of something in the future as if it already existed or had occurred; prochronism.
3. the use of a descriptive word in anticipation of its becoming applicable.
4. a fundamental conception or assumption in Epicureanism or Stoicism arising spontaneously in the mind without conscious reflection; thought provoked by sense perception.
5. Pathology. the return of an attack of a periodic disease or of a paroxysm before the expected time or at progressively shorter intervals.

It looks as though Homer, in this dubious prolepsis, were himself referring to an ambiguous tradition, or rather — since nothing in the present case prevented him from choosing, as did his continuators after him — as though he wished to leave them an open field by merely indicating the two possible roads to follow.
-- Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, 1997

As this is accomplished, the women are suddenly awakened to the various ways in which they have not yet shed the chains of the past, and as in a perfectly wrought prolepsis, intuit one another as the necessary tools with which to do so.
-- Terri Ginsberg, "Entre Nous, Female Eroticism, and the Narrative of Jewish Erasure", Romancing the Margins?, 2000

Prolepsis came to English in the mid-1400s from the Ancient Greek prolambanein literally meaning "to take before."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Furl

Word of the Day for Friday, March 15, 2013

Furl \furl\, verb:

1. to gather into a compact roll and bind securely, as a sail against a spar or a flag against its staff.
2. to become furled.

noun:
1. the act of furling.
2. something furled, as a roll.

We went aloft to furl the sails. We coughed on the yards, and were careful about the bunts.
-- Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, 1902

Furl the election flags, and furl the national standard!
-- Charles Dickens, "Flags to Furl," Household Words, 1853

The origins of furl are unknown, though it is believed to come either from the Middle English ferler meaning "to fold," or from the Old French ferliier meaning "chain," "tie up," or "lock away." While furl entered the English lexicon in the late 1500s, nearly 100 years before unfurl, it is now the more rare of the two terms.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Madcap

Word of the Day for Thursday, March 14, 2013

Madcap \MAD-kap\, adjective:

1. wildly or heedlessly impulsive; reckless; rash: a madcap scheme.

noun:
1. a madcap person.

You can still see strong strains of formal qualities and madcap humour in his own work, which he began creating in 1971.
-- Claudia La Rocco, "Sights in New York Like No Others," The New York Times, Dec. 14, 2012

Slothrop recognises him on sight, Judge Hardy's freckled madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-losing-my-mind face.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1995

Madcap is a portmanteau dated back to the late 1500s. The first part of this word comes from the Old High German gimeit, literally meaning "foolish" or "vain," and the second part takes a metaphorical spin on the the Late Latin cappa meaning "a hooded cloak."

Thanks t: www.dictionary.com 

Bevel

Word of the Day for Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Bevel \BEV-uhl\, adverb:

1. irresolutely.

noun:
1. the inclination that one line or surface makes with another when not at right angles.
2. a surface that does not form a right angle with adjacent surfaces.
3. (of a lock bolt) the oblique end that hits the strike plate.
4. (of a lock with a beveled bolt) the side facing in the same direction as the bevel at the end of the bolt.
5. bevel square.
6. an adjustable instrument for drawing angles or adjusting the surface of work to a particular inclination.
7. Printing. beard (def. 5).

verb:
1. to cut or slant at a bevel: to bevel an edge to prevent splintering.

adjective:
1. Also, beveled; especially British, bevelled. oblique; sloping; slanted.

One edge was rough and jagged, but from that edge, the stone had been worked into a smooth, clean semicircular curve, its edges trimmed in a simple bevel.
-- John Saul, Hellfire, 2010

Gives them a sort of three-D effect. The plus-one must be the width of the bevel.
-- Ellen Ullman, The Bug, 2003

The origin of bevel, which entered English in the 1500s, is uncertain, though it could possibly come from the Old French term biaiser meaning "to slope" or "to make slanting." It is unclear which came first: the adjective or the noun form.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Shilly-shally

Word of the Day for Monday, March 11, 2013

Shilly-shally \SHIL-ee-shal-ee\, verb:

1. to show indecision or hesitation; be irresolute; vacillate.
2. to waste time; dawdle.

noun:
1. irresolution; indecision; vacillation: It was sheer shilly-shally on his part.

adjective:
1. irresolute; undecided; vacillating.

Great mistake—Make up your mind and don't shilly shally.
-- Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery, 1964

But look, Your Highness, I didn't come to shilly-shally, so don't say anything to inhibit her. I want it straight.
-- Saul Bellow, Henderon the Rain King, 1959

In the great tradition of reduplicating a phrase to infuse it with a dose of levity, shilly-shally comes from the phrase “shall I, shall I.” When shilly-shally first entered English at the turn of the eighteenth century, it was spelled "shill I, shall I."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Linchpin

Word of the Day for Saturday, March 9, 2013

Linchpin \LINCH-pin\, noun:

1. something that holds the various elements of a complicated structure together: The monarchy was the linchpin of the nation's traditions and society.
2. a pin inserted through the end of an axletree to keep the wheel on.

Sometimes I feel if I lost it I would lose the linchpin of my life. But of course I remember that in one way I lost the linchpin years before, not long after I acquired the datebook. It was not an even swap.
-- Anna Quindlen, One True Thing, 2010

… let's not forget who started the whole thing, who was the first one to go out of his element and drown, whose watery death removed the linchpin, the foundation-stone, and began the family's long slide, which ended up by dumping me in the pit: Francisco de Gama, Epifania's defunct spouse.
-- Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh, 1995

Linchpin, a portmanteau of lynch and pin, comes from the Old English lynis. While the literal sense entered English in the late fourteenth century, the figurative sense has supplanted the original sense in most contexts since the 1950s.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com  

Scupper

Word of the Day for Friday, March 8, 2013

Scupper \SKUHP-er\, verb:

1. Informal. to prevent from happening or succeeding; ruin; wreck.
2. Military. to overwhelm; surprise and destroy, disable, or massacre.

But what if Ira had tried to back out, threatening to scupper the entire thing?
-- Mark Zuehlke, Hands Like Clouds, 2000

Last summer, Edward DeMarco, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's regulator, scuppered the White House's plan to write down principal for half a million homeowners who'd fallen behind on payments, listing among his reasons that it would encourage others to stop paying.
-- Tad Friend, "Home Economics," The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2013

Scupper first entered English as a nautical noun in the late 1400s. The verb senses did not enter English until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Tertiary

Word of the Day for Thursday, March 7, 2013

Tertiary \TUR-shee-er-ee, TUR-shuh-ree\, adjective:

1. of the third order, rank, stage, formation, etc.; third.
2. Chemistry. A. noting or containing a carbon atom united to three other carbon atoms. B. formed by replacement of three atoms or groups.
3. (initial capital letter) Geology. noting or pertaining to the period forming the earlier part of the Cenozoic Era, occurring from 65 million to 2 million years ago, characterised by the development and proliferation of mammals.
4. Ornithology. tertial.
5. Ecclesiastical. noting or pertaining to a branch, or third order, of certain religious orders that consists of lay members living in community (regular tertiaries) or living in the world (secular tertiaries).

noun:
1. (initial capital letter) Geology. the Tertiary Period or System.
2. Ornithology. a tertial feather.
3. (often initial capital letter) Ecclesiastical. a member of a tertiary branch of a religious order.
4. tertiary colour.

For it was impossible not to be sensible, that, while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre, I — though probably reckoned as a friend by all — was at best but a secondary or tertiary personage with either of them.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 1852

She'd explained all of this the last couple of days to various out-of-town cops who'd volunteered to take over the secondary and tertiary policing duties of the city.
-- Jay McInerney, The Good Life, 2007

He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him.
-- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818

Since entering English in the mid 1500s, tertiary, which comes from the Latin tertius meaning "third," has been applied as a technical term for many different subject matters.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Rialto

Word of the Day for Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Rialto \ree-AL-toh\, noun:

an exchange or mart.

We always did so in the same place, by a particular house, beyond the rialto in a steep-sloping backstreet of tenements, where advertisements turned in colours under the ivy.
-- China Miéville, Embassytown, 2011

I learn from Michael Lynch that courage of even the most spectacular nature isn't after all a spectacle, an arena with fixed sightlines, but instead a kind of floating permeable rialto of common lending, borrowing, extravagant indebtedness, and exchange.
-- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1990

The following morning dawned clear and cool, and the chef decided to send me to the Rialto to buy pears and Gorgonzola.
-- Elle Newmark, The Chef's Apprentice, 2011

Rialto comes from the name for the mercantile quarter of Venice during the middle ages. Shakespeare is thought to have brought the term into widespread usage from his play the Merchant of Venice, first performed at the turn of the seventeenth century. While it initially referred only to the specific marketplace in Venice, rialto soon took on a broader sense and could be applied marketplaces elsewhere.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Indite

Word of the Day for Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Indite \in-DAHYT\, verb:

1. to compose or write, as a poem.
2. to treat in a literary composition.
3. Obsolete. to dictate.
4. Obsolete. to prescribe.

"Will it be any harm," he said to his friends, "in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should teach them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite?"
-- Samuel Richardson, A Quiet Corner in a Library, 1915

And then she called her father Sir Barnard and her brother Sir Tirry, and heartily she prayed her father that her brother might write a letter like as she did indite; and so her father granted her.
-- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'arthur, 1470

Appearing in English in the mid-1300s, this wordy word comes from the Latin root dictare meaning "to declare, dictate, or compose in words." Combined with the prefix in-, indite literally means "to put down in writing."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Bibelot

Word of the Day for Monday, March 4, 2013

Bibelot \BIB-loh; Fr. beebuh-LOH\, noun:

a small object of curiosity, beauty, or rarity.

And in the meanwhile she was tasting what, she begun to suspect, was the maximum of bliss to most of the women she knew: days packed with engagements, the exhilaration of fashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel or a bibelot or a new "model" that one's best friend wanted, or of being invited to some private show, or some exclusive entertainment, that one's best friend couldn't get to.
-- Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922

Eugenio knew a number of old ladies whose circumstances reminded him of all he had lost, and in whose houses his cold sycophancy, his careful foreigner's diction, his elaborate courtliness screened the cupidity, the longing, with which he noted every teacup, every bibelot, every scrap of evidence of the blissful oblivion which money only can bring.
-- Paula Fox, The Widow's Children, 1976

Bibelot entered English in the late 1800s from the Old French beubelet meaning "trinket" or "jewel." This term originally came from the reduplication in Old French belbel, a word for a "plaything," the literal translation of which is "pretty pretty."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com

Mazuma

Word of the Day for Saturday, March 2, 2013

Mazuma \muh-ZOO-muh\, noun:

money.

...and I want mazuma, gelt, coin, rocks, or what have you!
-- Harry Stephen Keeler, The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri, 1930

The American's hostility to what is beautiful and charming — a hostility as deeply rooted in him as his belief in the omnipotence of mazuma and God — finds its best illustration in a reconnaissance of all those originally placid and lovely spots of his own country which, with what would seem to be a flagellant's glee, he has debased and made hideous.
-- George Jean Nathan, "Clinical Notes," American Mercury Magazine, 1927

Mazuma is a Yiddish word that comes to English from the Mishnaic Hebrew term mezumman. This term literally translates to "designated," "fixed," or "appointed," though it was used figuratively to refer to "cash" in Medieval Hebrew.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com