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