Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 1, 2024 is: scintilla • \sin-TIL-uh\ • noun A scintilla is a very small amount of something. Scintilla is usually used in negative statements, as in “not even/nary a scintilla.” // There wasn’t even a scintilla of evidence to support their story. See the entry > Examples: “… there was one part of his Irish childhood that would follow [Oscar] Wilde across the sea to England. A tiny part of his childhood, admittedly. The merest scintilla of his youth.” — Alexander Poots, The Strangers’ House: Writing Northern Ireland, 2023 Did you know? Wonder what scintillas (or scintillae) are? It may help spark your memory to look up above the world so high at the tiny (to our eyes) stars twinkling like diamonds in the sky. Scintilla comes directly from Latin, where it refers to a spark—that is, a bright flash such as you might see from a burning ember (the noun scintilla is related to the verb scintillare, which means “to sparkle” and is responsible for the English verb scintillate meaning “to sparkle or gleam”). In the 17th century, English carried over this “glittering particle” sense, which is still in use today, as when Scottish writer Rudi Zygadlo wrote of the Gulf of Mexico “fizzing with scintillas underneath the rising sun.” In the same century, people also began using scintilla figuratively for a hint or trace of something that barely suggests its presence. Today this sense is much more common, and especially found in negative statements, such as “We have not a scintilla of doubt that you are now humming ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 30, 2024 is: frugal • \FROO-gul\ • adjective Someone described as frugal is careful about spending money or using things unnecessarily. Frugal can also describe something that is simple and plain in a way that reflects such carefulness with money and resources. // By being frugal and limiting unnecessary purchases, the family is able to stretch its monthly budget. // Sometimes a frugal meal of bread, cheese, and grapes can be just as satisfying as a lavish feast. See the entry > Examples: “‘I would take anything that I had and put it into a pan and just fry it up, and then eat it with a fork out of the pan, because it would also cut down on the minimum amount of dishes for me to have to clean,’ he [Kevin Bacon] recalls of some of his early egg-onion-leftover-pasta concoctions. And though his frugal days are behind him, the star still prefers cooking over fancy restaurant meals most of the time.” — Clarissa Cruz, People, 9 Nov. 2023 Did you know? Folks who are frugal tend to frown on the frivolous frittering away of the fruits of their labor, so it may surprise you to learn that frugal comes from the Latin word frūx, which means, among other things, “fruit.” Perhaps because of fruit’s financial value, from frūx followed frūgī, an adjective meaning “deserving, sober, or thrifty,” which finagled its way into Late Latin in the form of frūgālis (“not given to excess; temperate, sober, simple”), then Middle French, and finally English, as the familiar frugal. Today, frugal is used to describe things that reflect a fastidious dedication to foregoing the fancy, as in “he insists on a frugal diet of fungi and fava beans.” Frugal can also describe a person, usually with respect to money, but one can be frugal with other things, too, such as words that start with the letter f, though we certainly haven’t been in this paragraph.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 29, 2024 is: obfuscate • \AHB-fuh-skayt\ • verb To obfuscate something is to make it more difficult to understand. Obfuscate can also mean “to be evasive, unclear, or confusing.”  // The revised wording of the rule obfuscates its meaning. // They allege that the company’s representative lied and obfuscated when answering questions about the report. See the entry > Examples: “‘I firmly believe that cyber-insecurity is fundamentally a policy problem,’ says Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the security firm Emsisoft. ‘We need standardized and uniform disclosure and reporting laws, prescribed language for those disclosures and reports, regulation and licensing of negotiators. Far too much happens in the shadows or is obfuscated by weasel words. It’s counterproductive and helps only the cybercriminals.’” — Lily Hay Newman, WIRED, 5 Dec. 2023 Did you know? “Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.” So begins the classic 1960s Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence,” which was written by Paul Simon with a seemingly oxymoronic title that has obfuscated—that is, confused—ten thousand people, maybe more (probably a lot more) in the decades since. It confuses us too, but we’re not above being oxymoronic ourselves when we say that darkness, our old friend, shines a helpful light on the meaning of the word obfuscate. When obfuscate first came into use in the early 16th century, it was with the meaning “to throw into shadow.” This makes sense, since the word comes from the Latin obfuscāre (“to obscure or darken”) which itself comes in part from fuscus (“dark-colored”). The word was used for both figurative and literal darkening before developing the even more figurative senses of “to make more difficult to understand,” “to be evasive or unclear,” and “to confuse,” which in modern use are now more common.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 28, 2024 is: victuals • \VIT-ulz\ • noun plural Victuals is a word with an old-fashioned feel that refers to food, and sometimes to both food and drink. // Rachel’s grandparents’ larder was full of canned tomatoes and peaches, jars of pickled beans, jugs of dandelion wine, and other time-honored victuals. See the entry > Examples: “May in Atlanta brings refreshing cocktails, meals on the patio and Cinco de Mayo festivities. The holiday, which celebrates the Mexican army’s victory over France at the 1862 Battle of Puebla, offers the perfect occasion to appreciate Mexican-American culture and all the great victuals associated with it.” — Olivia Wakim, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 22 Apr. 2024 Did you know? In the introduction to her 2016 cookbook Victuals, writer Ronni Lundy remarks on the (to some) unusual divergence between how her book’s title is spelled and how it is pronounced: “Say it the way my people have for centuries: vidls. ... Maybe you thought saying it that way was wrong. But look up that word in your dictionary. It turns out my people, the people of the southern Appalachian Mountains, have been right about victuals all along.” Indeed, they have! Victuals refers to supplies of usually prepared foods (rather than raw ingredients) and comes from the Late Latin word victualia meaning “provisions,” and ultimately from Latin vivere, “to live.” It went through French before it came into English, and the pronunciation VIT-ulz was presumably established based on the French spelling vitaille before the spelling was changed to better reflect the Latin root of the word. Victuals would be spelled “vittles” if its pronunciation dictated its form, and vittles is in fact given in our dictionaries as a variant of victuals, though the spelling is used mostly playfully to evoke the supposed language of cowboys as depicted in movies, etc.