Word of the Day
Learn a new word every day! The Dictionary.com team of language experts carefully selects each Word of the Day to add some panache to your vocabulary.
perpetual; everlasting; continuing; recurrent.
Perennial, “perpetual, continuing,” comes from Latin perennis, “lasting the whole year through,” which is based on per, “through, by,” and -enn-, a combining form of annus, “year.” A common trend in Latin is for a to change to e or i in compounds; other examples of this include ars, “skill,” becoming iners, “unskillful” (compare art and inert), and amīcus, “friend,” becoming inimicus, “unfriendly” (compare amicable, enemy, and the Word of the Day inimical). Perennial is often confused with annual because the two have similar meanings and origins, but you can learn to tell the difference by reading our article on these words. Perennial was first recorded in English circa 1640. EXAMPLE OF PERENNIAL USED IN A SENTENCE A key feature of the lands north of the Arctic Circle is its nearly perennial winter, with cold temperatures even in July.
a region of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in which billions of comets move in nearly circular orbits unless one is pulled into a highly eccentric elliptical orbit by a passing star.
The Oort cloud is the namesake of Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who first proposed the cloud’s existence. The surname Oort comes from Middle Dutch ort or oort, meaning “edge, corner, outermost point,” which makes the name Oort cloud serendipitously perfect for an area at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. Oort cloud was coined in the 1970s. EXAMPLE OF OORT CLOUD USED IN A SENTENCE Because the Oort cloud is so far away and contains such dim objects, we may never know just how many comets are secretly lurking out there. FUN FACT ABOUT OORT CLOUD While the Kuiper belt is 30–50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and contains dwarf planets, the Oort cloud is a whopping 2,000–200,000 AU from the Sun and contains only asteroid-like objects. Learn more fun facts at the Museum of Science.
a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following one.
Pantoum, “a Malay verse featuring repeated lines,” is a borrowing from French of Malay origin. Malay has two widely used standardized forms: Standard Malay, which is an official language in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian, spoken by about 300 million people in Indonesia. Because Malay is a member of the Austronesian language family, it is distantly related to Hawaiian, Malagasy (in Madagascar), Maori (in New Zealand), and Tagalog (in the Philippines). The Malay source of pantoum is pantun, with the change from n to m because of a printer’s error in 19th-century France. Pantoum was first recorded in English in the early 1880s. EXAMPLE OF PANTOUM USED IN A SENTENCE The regular repetition of lines in pantoums means that poets have to be clever about context and meaning, or readers may find the verses rather stale.
government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
Democracy, "government by the people," comes from the Middle French noun démocratie, which comes via Latin from Greek dēmokratía, "popular government." Democracy was first recorded in English in the early 1500s.
a formal expression of opinion or choice made by an individual or body of individuals, especially in an election.
Vote, "to express or signify will or choice in a matter," comes from a late Middle English noun that ultimately comes from Latin vōtum “a vow made to a deity; prayer, desire, hope.” Vote was first recorded in English in the late 1400s.
