etymology

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 21, 2025 is: sedentary • \SED-un-tair-ee\  • adjective Something described as sedentary does or involves a lot of sitting. Sedentary can also mean "not physically active" (as in "a sedentary lifestyle") or "not migratory" (as in "sedentary birds" or "a sedentary civilization"). // Editing the dictionary is a sedentary job. See the entry > Examples: "From open offices to home workstations, employees across industries invested in sit-stand setups with the hope of counteracting sedentary lifestyles." — Michelle Stansbury, Forbes, 25 Aug. 2025 Did you know? Sedentary comes from the Latin verb sedēre, meaning "to sit." Other descendants of sedēre include dissident, insidious, preside, reside, and subsidy. Sedēre is also the base of the rare sedens, a noun that refers to a person who remains a resident of the place or region of their birth.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 20, 2025 is: etymology • \eh-tuh-MAH-luh-jee\  • noun An etymology is an explanation of a word’s history—that is, where the word came from and how it developed. // As a word nerd, I’m always eager to learn a word’s etymology and trace it back to its earliest known origins. See the entry > Examples: “A recent Vogue bride, Nicole Amarise, changed her name—as did her husband. ‘Together we opted to create a new one for our new life together,’ she says. ‘We gave ChatGPT information about the etymology of our old surnames, and guided it to generate surname options for us that could relate to our heritages and cultures.’” — Shelby Wax, Vogue, 16 Aug. 2025 Did you know? The etymology of etymology itself is relatively straightforward, so we won’t bug you with a lengthy explanation. Etymology ultimately comes from the Greek word etymon, meaning “literal meaning of a word according to its origin.” Etymon in turn comes from etymos, which means “true.” Be careful not to confuse etymology with the similar sounding entomology. Entomon means “insect” in Greek, and entomology is a branch of zoology that deals with insects.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 19, 2025 is: veritable • \VAIR-uh-tuh-bul\  • adjective Veritable is a formal adjective that means “being in fact the thing named and not false, unreal, or imaginary.” It is often used to stress the aptness of a metaphorical description. // The island is a veritable paradise. // The sale attracted a veritable mob of people. See the entry > Examples: “The Roma are often described as an ethnic minority, but many Romani communities view ‘Roma’ as a broad racial identity, stretching all the way back to our Indian ancestry. Indeed, to look at the Roma as one ethnicity is to disregard the veritable mosaic of Romani subgroups. There’s a thread that holds us all together, which to me feels like a string of fairy lights scattered across the world. Each of these lights shines with its own unique beauty.” — Madeline Potter, The Roma: A Traveling History, 2025 Did you know? Veritable, like its close relative verity (“truth”), came to English through Anglo-French from Latin, ultimately the adjective vērus, meaning “true,” which also gave English verify, aver, and verdict. Veritable is often used as a synonym of genuine or authentic (“a veritable masterpiece”), but it is also frequently used to stress the aptness of a metaphor, often with a humorous tone (“a veritable swarm of lawyers”). In the past, language commentators objected to the latter use, but today it doesn’t draw much criticism.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 18, 2025 is: muse • \MYOOZ\  • verb When muse is used to mean "to think about something carefully or thoroughly," it is usually followed by about, on, over, or upon. The word can also mean "to become absorbed in thought," or "to think or say something in a thoughtful way." // He mused on the possibility of pursuing a master's degree. // "I could sell the house," she mused aloud, "but then where would I go?" See the entry > Examples: "On a crisp winter's day, 100-year-old Peg Logan sits in her favorite wingback chair in the living room of her Harpswell home. She flips through the pages of an oversized gardening book and muses about the vegetables she'll plant in the spring." — Connie Sage Conner, The Harpswell (Maine) Anchor, 27 Feb. 2025 Did you know? Muse on this: the word muse comes from the Anglo-French verb muser, meaning "to gape, to idle, to muse." The image evoked is one of a thinker so absorbed in thought as to be unconsciously open-mouthed. Those who muse on their pets' musings might like to know that muser is ultimately from the Medieval Latin noun musus, meaning "mouth of an animal"—also source of the word muzzle. The noun muse, which in lowercase refers to a source of inspiration and when capitalized to one of the sister goddesses of Greek mythology, has no etymological link: that word comes from the Greek Mousa. The ultimate Greek origin of the word museum translates as "of the Muses."

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 17, 2025 is: kibosh • \KYE-bosh\  • noun Kibosh refers to something that serves as a check or stop. It is usually used in the phrase “put the kibosh on” to mean “to stop or end (something)” or “to prevent (something) from happening or continuing.” // I downloaded an app to help me put the kibosh on my high screen time. See the entry > Examples: “… Maybe, suggests [Graham] Dugoni and other advocates, instead of putting the kibosh on devices entirely, we need to treat modern society like a teenager on a rebellious streak. Rather than saying no, we need to show them support, offer a gentle hand, maybe even make them think it’s their idea. In a way, it’s time for some gentle parenting.” — Chase DiBenedetto, Mashable, 3 June 2025 Did you know? Evidence of kibosh dates the word to only a few years before Charles Dickens used it in an 1836 sketch, but despite kibosh being relatively young its source is elusive. Claims were once made that it was Yiddish, despite the absence of a plausible Yiddish source. Another hypothesis pointed to the Irish term caidhp bhais, literally, “coif (or cap) of death,” explained as headgear a judge put on when pronouncing a death sentence, or as a covering pulled over the face of a corpse when a coffin was closed. But evidence for any metaphorical use of this phrase in Irish is lacking, and kibosh is not recorded in English as spoken in Ireland until decades after Dickens’s use. More recent source theories include a heraldic term for an animal’s head when born with only its face fully showing, and an Arabic word meaning “whip, lash,” but as the note at our etymology explains, no theory has sufficient evidence to back it.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 16, 2025 is: biannual • \bye-AN-yuh-wul\  • adjective Biannual is an adjective used to describe something that happens twice a year, or something that happens every two years. Biannual is always used before the noun it describes. // The art show is a biannual event that won’t happen again for two more years. // The group holds biannual meetings in December and July. See the entry > Examples: “About 200 miles of trails make up The Alabama Coastal Birding Trail along Alabama’s Gulf coast. These comprehensive trails span both Baldwin and Mobile counties, following the coastline, wetlands, and backwaters—all crucial stopover habitats for migratory birds. Visit in the fall or spring to see part of the beautiful biannual journey for yourself.” — Catherine Jessee, Southern Living, 8 Mar. 2025 Did you know? When we describe something as biannual, we can mean either that it occurs twice a year or that it occurs once every two years. So how does someone know which particular meaning we have in mind? Well, unless we provide them with a contextual clue, they don’t. Some people prefer to use semiannual to refer to something that occurs twice a year, reserving biannual for things that occur once every two years. This practice is hardly universal among English speakers, however, and biannual remains a potentially ambiguous word. Fortunately, English also provides us with biennial, a word that specifically refers to something that occurs every two years or that lasts or continues for two years.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 16, 2025 is: biannual • \bye-AN-yuh-wul\  • adjective Biannual is an adjective used to describe something that happens twice a year, or something that happens every two years. // The art show is a biannual event that won’t happen again for two more years. // The group holds biannual meetings in December and July. See the entry > Examples: “About 200 miles of trails make up The Alabama Coastal Birding Trail along Alabama’s Gulf coast. These comprehensive trails span both Baldwin and Mobile counties, following the coastline, wetlands, and backwaters—all crucial stopover habitats for migratory birds. Visit in the fall or spring to see part of the beautiful biannual journey for yourself.” — Catherine Jessee, Southern Living, 8 Mar. 2025 Did you know? When we describe something as biannual, we can mean either that it occurs twice a year or that it occurs once every two years. So how does someone know which particular meaning we have in mind? Well, unless we provide them with a contextual clue, they don’t. Some people prefer to use semiannual to refer to something that occurs twice a year, reserving biannual for things that occur once every two years. This practice is hardly universal among English speakers, however, and biannual remains a potentially ambiguous word. Fortunately, English also provides us with biennial, a word that specifically refers to something that occurs every two years or that lasts or continues for two years.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 15, 2025 is: coalesce • \koh-uh-LESS\  • verb To coalesce is to come together to form one group or mass. // The club’s community service projects provide students with a common goal to coalesce around. // The movie is full of beautifully written scenes but they never coalesce into a whole. See the entry > Examples: “... as Angola prepares for the final, the combination of personal perseverance, team cohesion, and national pride coalesces into something bigger than a game: a celebration of resilience, dedication, and the enduring spirit of basketball in Angola.” — Sindiswa Mabunda, Forbes, 24 Aug. 2025 Did you know? The meaning of many English words equals the sum of their parts, and coalesce is a fitting example. The word unites the prefix co- (“together”) and the Latin verb alescere, meaning “to grow.” Coalesce is one of a number of English verbs (along with mix, commingle, merge, and amalgamate) that refer to the act of combining parts into a whole. In particular, coalesce usually implies the merging of similar parts to form a cohesive unit, such as a political ideology, a fan-following, or (perish the thought) a Portuguese man-of-war, the body of which includes three types of zooids.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 14, 2025 is: utopia • \yoo-TOH-pee-uh\  • noun Utopia refers to an imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect; a utopia is a place of ideal perfection. // It’s a nice place to live, but it’s no utopia. See the entry > Examples: “Despite the rest of the group arguing with and (mostly) disagreeing with him for half the evening, my colleague stuck to his guns: it would be handy to have robots writing poetry for people. … But at the heart of my colleague’s provocative position was a utopian ideal: of a future in which technology was advanced enough to ‘do everything,’ even write poetry, so that no one needed to work. Yet this position wasn’t convincing either. His utopia sounded more than a little dull, and nobody wants to be bored out of their minds.” — Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, 2025 Did you know? There’s quite literally no place like utopia. In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas More published a book titled Utopia, which compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. More wanted to imply that the perfect conditions on his fictional island could never really exist, so he called it “Utopia,” a name he created by combining the Greek words ou (“not, no”) and topos (“place”). The earliest generic use of utopia was for an imaginary and indefinitely remote place. The current use of utopia, referring to an ideal place or society, was inspired by More’s description of Utopia’s perfection.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 13, 2025 is: penultimate • \pih-NUL-tuh-mut\  • adjective Penultimate means "occurring immediately before the last one," or in other words, "next to last." A formal adjective, it is always used before the noun it modifies. // The penultimate episode of the TV series features some shocking plot twists that set up what will surely be a thrilling series finale. See the entry > Examples: "The high school soccer playoffs are down to their penultimate round with the state semifinals looming later this week after a select few regional champions were crowned on Tuesday." — Matt Welch, The Plano (Texas) Star Courier, 2 Apr. 2025 Did you know? Penultimate isn't the last word in words for things that are next to last. It has a pair of closely-related noun synonyms: penult and penultima. Although all three concern something that's next to last, penult and penultima are usually a bit more specific; they are used most often to identify the next to last syllable of a word. All three come from paenultima, the feminine of paenultimus, a Latin root from paene ("almost") and ultimus ("last"). You may occasionally hear the word penultimate used as an intensified version of ultimate, as in "a race they've called 'the penultimate challenge.'" This use isn't typically found in edited prose, however, or in dictionaries, as discussed in this video.