Scrum

Word of the Day for Sunday, June 30, 2013

Scrum \skruhm\, noun:

1. a Rugby play in which, typically, three members of each team line up opposite one another with a group of two and a group of three players behind them, making an eight-person, three-two-three formation on each side; the ball is then rolled between the opposing front lines, the players of which stand with arms around a teammate's waist, meeting the opponent shoulder to shoulder, and attempt to kick the ball backward to a teammate.
2. British. a place or situation of confusion and racket; hubbub.

verb:
1. to engage in a scrum.

This wasn't to be a scrum, but a more formal announcement, with the journalists plugging into a multifeed box for the audio.
-- Terry Fallis, The High Road, 2010

The half who was taking the scrum whipped the ball out in the direction of his colleague.
-- P. G. Wodehouse, A Prefect's Uncle, 1903

Scrum is an abbreviated form of scrummage, which is a variant of scrimmage. It likely came to English in the late-1800s from the Old High German word skirmen meaning "to protect" or "defend."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Lese Majesty

Word of the Day for Thursday, June 27, 2013

Lese Majesty \LEZ MAJ-uh-stee, LEEZ-\, noun:

1. Law. a. a crime, especially high treason, committed against the sovereign power. b. an offense that violates the dignity of a ruler.
2. an attack on any custom, institution, belief, etc., held sacred or revered by numbers of people: Her speech against Mother's Day was criticized as lese majesty.

“Little brother, if you're going to commit lese majesty, never do it by messenger. I'd have to execute him too, and it's wasteful.”
-- Harry Turtledove, The Misplaced Legion, 1987

His father was what you call an agitator, and his father was in jail for lese majesty—what you call speaking the truth about the Emperor.
-- Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1908

This term, which entered English in the 1400s, comes from the Latin laesa majestos, which literally means "violated majesty."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Asyndeton

Word of the Day for Monday, June 24, 2013

Asyndeton \uh-SIN-di-ton\, noun:

1. Rhetoric. the omission of conjunctions, as in “He has provided the poor with jobs, with opportunity, with self-respect.”
2. Library Science. the omission of cross references, especially from a catalog.

So how could Eddy, who could not sort his own, have made anything at all of the jumble of mixed motives and crossed purposes, ordinary and routine as heavy traffic, or seen design in their snarl of wills, feelings, and intentions, asynchronous and asyndeton as timber soaking in a logjam?
-- Stanley Elkin, The Magic Kingdom, 1985

The most brilliant general would be laughed at—albeit behind his back—if he couldn't report his accomplishments using chiasmus and litotes, praeteritio and asyndeton and a thousand other absurdities.
-- David Drake, Out of the Waters, 2011

Asyndeton came to English in the late-1500s from the Greek roots a- + syndetos literally meaning "not bound together."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Drawl

Word of the Day for Sunday, June 23, 2013

Drawl \drawl\, verb:

1. to say or speak in a slow manner, usually prolonging the vowels.

noun:
1. an act or utterance of a person who drawls.

"They particularly object to what they describe as the drawling intonation of American actors." "Drawl!" exclaimed Maryna. "Since when do I drawl?"
-- Susan Sontag, In America: A Novel, 1999

She is discussed by her dear friends with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite indifference.
-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1853

Almost immediately the glass door opened again to admit a stocky figure that held back for a moment in the shadows at the far end of the room and in a kind of drawl said something that sounded like “ 't's 'n honor.”
-- Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, 1901

Drawl entered English in the late-1500s and is likely from the East Frisian draulen meaning "to linger" or "delay." It is thought to be related to the word draw.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Fen

Word of the Day for Saturday, June 22, 2013

Fen \fen\, noun:

1. low land covered wholly or partially with water; boggy land; a marsh.
2. the Fens, a marshy region W and S of The Wash, in E England.

It was already very ancient; its foundation had been laid by Roman soldiery; in the lapse of ages much of it had sunk, and every here and there, for a few hundred yards, it lay submerged below the stagnant waters of the fen.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, 1888

We could do nothing but get drenched while the earth spat mud around us and the fen steamed and boiled.
-- Jeremy Page, Salt, 2007

Fen came from the Old English term fenn, and ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root pen- meaning "swamp."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Poniard

Word of the Day for Friday, June 21, 2013

Poniard \PON-yerd\, noun:

1. a small, slender dagger.

verb:
1. to stab with a poniard.

He lifted himself up as far as the waist of Yvonnet and pricked him with his poniard. "Do yon feel the point of my poniard?" he asked. "Yes, monseigneur. Mercy! mercy! I am afraid!" "It is sharp and keen," continued Gabriel...
-- Alexandre Dumas, père, The Two Dianas, 1846

He did not want to use the poniard yet, but he longed to possess it. If he could grasp its handle and try its edge, that blank in his mind—that past which fell away continually—would not make him feel so cruelly helpless…
-- George Eliot, Romola, 1863

Poniard entered English in the 1500s and ultimately comes from the Latin pungus meaning "fist." The Old French word poignal literally refers to something held by the fist.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Hamlet

Word of the Day for Thursday, June 20, 2013

Hamlet \HAM-lit\, noun:

1. a small village.
2. British. a village without a church of its own, belonging to the parish of another village or town.

The world was indeed excluded; the sides of the valley shut in the small hamlet and fenced it from the keen and biting winds of the north and east.
-- John Carne, Tales of the West, 1828

Soon appeared glimmering indications of the few cottages forming the small hamlet of Upper Mellstock for which they were bound, whilst the faint sound of church-bells ringing a Christmas peal could be heard floating over upon the breeze...
-- Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872

The term hamlet entered English in the 1300s, long before Shakespeare wrote about the Prince of Denmark, from the Old French ham meaning "villiage."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Balk

Word of the Day for Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Balk \balk\, verb:

1. to stop, as at an obstacle, and refuse to proceed or to do something specified (usually followed by at): He balked at making the speech.
2. (of a horse, mule, etc.) to stop short and stubbornly refuse to go on.
3. to place an obstacle in the way of; hinder; thwart: a sudden reversal that balked her hopes.
4. Archaic. to let slip; fail to use: to balk an opportunity.

noun:
1. a check or hindrance; defeat; disappointment.
2. a strip of land left unplowed.

...and now I was apprenticed to the best editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963

At the very moment when she would have seized her prey, the hare moved and darted along the balk between the winter rye and the stubble.
-- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1869

Balk comes from the Old Norse balkr meaning "ridge of land." The modern figurative senses of this term relate to obstructions in passage resulting from unplowed land.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Phosphoresce

Word of the Day for Monday, June 17, 2013

Phosphoresce \fos-fuh-RES\, verb:

to be luminous without sensible heat, as phosphorus.

Maybe it's the gloomy dark, the phosphoresce from the glubbing aquarium. But mostly it's the way Coach's eyes seem to vibrate when she looks at me, pupils like nail heads.
-- Megan Abbott, Dare Me, 2012

From the boulevard they turned towards the pavilion, and for a long time gazed at the phosphorescent sea. Von Koren began to explain what made it phosphoresce.
-- Anton Chekhov, The Duel, 1891

Phosphoresce came to English in the late-1700s from the Greek Phosphoros meaning "morning star," or literally "torchbearer."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Mishpocha

Word of the Day for Sunday, June 16, 2013

Mishpocha \mish-PAW-khuh, -POOKH-uh\, noun:

an entire family network comprising relatives by blood and marriage and sometimes including close friends; clan.

Levinsky told him he didn't need a lawyer. "Dealing with us is like mishpocha. Who needs a lawyer to talk to mishpocha." Simon learned later they had cheated him, but who cares, who would have cared?
-- Arthur A. Cohen, In the Days of Simon Stern, 1973

“You can speak now. We're all mishpocha here and we got no secrets.”
-- Leon Uris, Exodus, 1958

Mishpocha entered English in the mid-1800s and comes from the Yiddish and Hebrew words for "family" or "clan."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Diglossia

Word of the Day for Friday, June 14, 2013

Diglossia \dahy-GLOS-ee-uh, -GLAW-see-uh\, noun:

1. the widespread existence within a society of sharply divergent formal and informal varieties of a language each used in different social contexts or for performing different functions, as the existence of Katharevusa and Demotic in modern Greece.
2. Pathology. the presence of two tongues or of a single tongue divided into two parts by a cleft.

Arabic took over many of the functions of Aramaic as the language of scholarship, and, as one vernacular replaced another, the original state of diglossia was restored.
-- David Biale, Cultures of the the Jews: A New History, 2002

Sociolinguistic studies indicate that diglossia and code-switching are very pertinent characteristics of the linguistic repertoires of a large portion of the population…
-- Christa Van der Walt, Living Through Languages: An African Tribute to René Dirven, 2006

Diglossia comes from the Greek term meaning "bilingual" and entered English in the 1950s.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Sward

Word of the Day for Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Sward \swawrd\, noun:

1. the grassy surface of land; turf.
2. a stretch of turf; a growth of grass.

verb:
1. to cover with sward or turf.
2. to become covered with sward.

One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the sward in an oval enclosure within St. James' Park...
-- Herman Melville, Israel Potter, 1855

The arching trees gave no cover, so Edward skidded into the woodland behind the tall guardian beeches on the other side of the grove and fell down, promptly into the long grass near to the edge of the sward...
-- Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, 1985

Sward comes from the Proto-Germanic root swarthu- meaning "skin" or "rind." While in Old English sward referred to the skin of an animal, by the 1400s it started referring to the outer layer of the earth where grass grows.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Spelunk

Word of the Day for Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Spelunk \spi-LUHNGK\, verb:

to explore caves, especially as a hobby.

They were flown to Lebanon to ski the unlikely snow, sail the Mediterranean, spelunk the Jeita cave.
-- Kim Barnes, In the Kingdom of Men. 2012

The pair of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gables of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph.
-- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 2000

Spelunk entered English in the 1300s from the Latin spelunca meaning "cave" or "cavern."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Codger

Word of the Day for Monday, June 10, 2013

Codger \KOJ-er\, noun:

an eccentric man, especially one who is old.

He'll find one of those joints and be there, evening after evening, talking to the bartender confidentially but loud enough. It won't be long before they get used to him. An old codger with money, stooped but still pretty big.
-- Louis Begley, Schmidt Delivered, 2000

One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962

Codger is likely related to the word cadge meaning "to beg." Its etymology is uncertain.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Abdicate

Word of the Day for Friday, June 7, 2013

Abdicate \AB-di-keyt\, verb:

1. to give up or renounce (authority, duties, an office, etc.), especially in a voluntary, public, or formal manner: King Edward VIII of England abdicated the throne in 1936.
2. to renounce or relinquish a throne, right, power, claim, responsibility, or the like, especially in a formal manner: The aging founder of the firm decided to abdicate.

I hereby abdicate all government power over the flow of data across and within my borders. Under no circumstances will any part of this government snoop on information flows, or use its power to in any way restrict such flows.
-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, 1999

What if he were to abdicate the title and become a republican?
-- Anthony Trollope, The Duke's Children, 1879

Abdicate comes from the Latin abdicare meaning "to disown," "to disavow," or "to reject." The transitive sense entered English in the 1500s, though the intransitive sense didn't appear until 100 years later.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Hadal

Word of the Day for Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Hadal \HEYD-l\, adjective:

1. of or pertaining to the greatest ocean depths, below approximately 20,000 feet (6500 meters).
2. of or pertaining to the biogeographic region of the ocean bottom below the abyssal zone.

Here a once-living being found the hadal current which twists in the waters of all rivers.
-- Lawrence Norfolk, The Shape of a Boar, 2000

By which I mean, if the earth itself were shrunk to the size of a lemon, the black hadal depths of even the Marianas Trench would be shallower than that moist breath of yours gathered on the lemon's skin.
-- Brad Leithauser, The Friends of Freeland, 1997

Hadal entered English in the mid-1900s, and comes from the name Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Zither

Word of the Day for Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Zither \ZITH-er, ZITH-\, noun:

a musical instrument, consisting of a flat sounding box with numerous strings stretched over it, that is placed on a horizontal surface and played with a plectrum and the fingertips.

The fourth was a young man; he was seated in the window, with his back towards me, bending over his zither. But I could see that he wore a beard. When I came up the old man was playing the violin, though playing is not indeed the word.
-- A. E. W. Mason, The Four Feathers, 1902

...Natalie Lind could play the zither, as one eager listener soon discovered. He, in that far corner, could only see the profile of the girl (just touched with a faint red from the shade of the nearest candle, as she leaned over the instrument), and the shapely wrists and fingers as they moved on the metallic strings.
-- William Black, Sunrise, 1881

Zither entered English in the mid-1850s and ultimately comes from the Greek term for "lute," kithara.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Automaton

Word of the Day for Monday, June 3, 2013

Automaton \aw-TOM-uh-ton, -tn\, noun:

1. a mechanical figure or contrivance constructed to act as if by its own motive power; robot.
2. a person or animal that acts in a monotonous, routine manner, without active intelligence.
3. something capable of acting automatically or without an external motive force.

That this is so is evident from the fact that some apprentices as early as their thirteenth year are able to construct an automaton whose motions are anatomically flawless.
-- Steven Millhauser, "The New Automaton Theater," The Knife Thrower: and Other Stories, 1998

"You really are an automaton — a calculating machine," I cried. "There is something positively inhuman in you at times." He smiled gently.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890

Automaton comes from the Greek autos + matos, literally meaning "self thinking." It entered English in the 1600s.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Lunker

Word of the Day for Sunday, June 2, 2013

Lunker \LUHNG-ker\, noun:

1. something unusually large for its kind.
2. Angling. a very large game fish, especially a bass.

In another year, June MacPherson became pregnant again, this time with a lesser character than Rory, a lunker who marched off peacefully to the altar.
-- Leon Uris, Redemption, 1995

The lunker watched him lazily from cool blue eyes and paused to suck an inch of beer. "You going to pinch him?" Peach asked amiably. No, Santiago thought, he wouldn't. He had something better in mind.
-- Richard S. Wheeler, Deuces and Ladies Wild, 2008

Lunker entered English in the early 1900s and its origin is unknown.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com 

Ken

Word of the Day for Saturday, June 1, 2013

Ken \ken\, noun:

1. knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken.
2. range of sight or vision.

verb:
1. Chiefly Scot. a. to know, have knowledge of or about, or be acquainted with (a person or thing). b. to understand or perceive (an idea or situation).
2. Scots Law. to acknowledge as heir; recognize by a judicial act.
3. Archaic. to see; descry; recognize.
4. British Dialect Archaic. a. to declare, acknowledge, or confess (something). b. to teach, direct, or guide (someone).
5. British Dialect. a. to have knowledge of something. b. to understand.

…I only loathed myself the more, as the foul corse was borne beyond my ken, that my lot was not even as that of him who had perished in the deep waters.
-- Julia Pardoe, The Romance of the Harem, 1839

I drew out my glass to take a nearer ken, when such beauties shot from one in particular that fired my soul and ran thrilling through every vein.
-- Georgiana Cavendish, The Sylph, 1778

Ken comes from the Old English cennan meaning "to make known, declare." It is related to the common English word "can." Today this verb is chiefly used in Scotland.

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com