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.
having a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination.
Phantasmagoric “having a fantastic appearance” is a compound of two elements. The first is phantasm “apparition, fantasy,” from Ancient Greek phántasma “image, vision.” This, in turn, comes from the verb phaínein “to bring to light, cause to appear,” which is the source of many fant- and phant- words in English, from fantastic and fantasy to hierophant and phantom. The second element in phantasmagoric is likely to be either from Ancient Greek agorá “assembly, gathering” (as in agoraphobia) or its derivative allēgoría “figurative language” (as in allegory). Phantasmagoric was first recorded in English in the early 1810s.
of or having the nature of an original model or prototype.
Archetypal “having the nature of an original model,” the adjective form of the noun archetype, comes from Ancient Greek archétypon “a model, pattern.” The first element in archétypon is based on one of three related words—archḗ “beginning,” árchos “leader,” árchein “to be the first, command”—all of uncertain ultimate origin. The second element is týpos “mold, type” (earlier “blow, impression”), which may be distantly related to a variety of English st- words once connected to pushing, knocking together, cutting off, or sticking out, including steep, steeple, stepchild, stint, stock, stoop, stub, stunt, and stutter. Archetypal was first recorded in English in the 1640s.
to insert (an extra day, month, etc.) in the calendar.
Intercalate “to insert an extra day in the calendar” is based on the Latin verb intercalāre, of the same meaning, which is a compound of the preposition inter “between, among” and the verb calāre “to proclaim.” Though calāre looks and sounds quite a bit like English call, the two are not related; Grimm’s law shows that Latin c tends to correspond to Old English h, while Old English c is equivalent to Latin g. In this way, Latin calāre is related to Old English hlōwan “to roar,” becoming English low “to moo.” Meanwhile, English call may be related to Latin gallus “rooster.” Intercalate was first recorded in English circa 1610.
tedious from familiarity; stale.
Hoary “tedious from familiarity” is an adjective based on the noun hoar “frost, a grayish-white,” which is of Germanic origin. Because English and German are both Germanic languages, hoary has two cognates in German—hehr “sublime, noble” and Herr “gentleman, sir, mister”—that show a shift in definition from gray hair alone to words of respect for gray-haired individuals. From there, there are at least three possibilities for the ultimate origin of hoary: one hypothesis connects hoary to the same root for color-related words that gives rise to hue, a second option links hoary to an ancient root meaning “to shine,” and a third proposes that hoary shares a source with obscure (via Latin), shadow (via Old English), and the recent Word of the Day sciamachy (via Ancient Greek). Hoary was first recorded in English in the 1520s.
a feeling of vexation, marked by disappointment or humiliation.
The story of chagrin “a feeling of vexation” is a rather mysterious one, and the linguistic community is at odds over the word’s origin. One proposal is that chagrin comes from obsolete dialectal French chagraigner or chagreiner “to distress, sadden,” perhaps from Old French graim “sorrowful,” which is related to German Gram “sadness,” combined with Old French chat “cat,” a common metaphorical element in terms related to distress. The other major hypothesis is that chagrin is the same as the French homonym chagrin “rough skin, shagreen,” a variant of sagrin, from Turkish sağrι “rump of a horse.” Chagrin was first recorded in English in the 1650s.
