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.
pollination of a flower by pollen from another flower on the same plant.
Geitonogamy “self-pollination of a flower” is a compound based on Ancient Greek geítōn “neighbor” and the combining form -gamy “marriage, union, fertilization.” The form -gamy, in turn, is based on Ancient Greek -gamía “act of marrying” (from gámos “marriage”) and appears in terms such as allogamy (literally “self-marriage”), bigamy (“marriage twice”), endogamy (“marriage within”), exogamy (“marriage outside”), monogamy (“alone marriage”), and polygamy (“many marriage”). Using Latin instead, the Latin equivalent of geitonogamy would be the rather lengthy “vicinimatrimony” or “vicininuptials.” Geitonogamy was first recorded in English in the late 1870s.
anew; afresh; again; from the beginning.
De novo “anew, from the beginning” is a loan from Latin that comprises dē “from, of, about” and novō, a form of novus “new.” In English, only pronouns change in form to indicate case, such as subject (I, we), possessive (my, our), and object (me, us) pronouns. In Latin, however, nouns and adjectives also change their endings according to case. In this way, novus is the subject, novī is the possessive, novum is the direct object, and novō is both the indirect and prepositional object. All these are only the masculine singular forms, however; almost two dozen other forms exist in the plural number and the feminine and neuter genders. No wonder that modern Romance languages decided to simplify things a bit! De novo was first recorded in English in the 1620s.
a heavy mist or drizzle that occurs in the Congo Basin, located in Central Africa, often accompanied by onshore winds.
Cacimbo “a heavy mist that occurs in the Congo Basin” is a borrowing from Portuguese, which in turn likely adapted the term from the word for “well (for water)” in Kimbundu, a Bantu language of northern Angola. Because the former Portuguese Empire maintained a presence in several parts of western and southern Africa, numerous terms originating in African languages (particularly the Niger-Congo family) passed into Portuguese, which is still an official language in six African countries. With Portuguese as an intermediary, English has inherited batuque, samba, and the recent Word of the Day capoeira, all probably from West African languages. Cacimbo was first recorded in English in the early 1860s.
to make a transition from one thing to another smoothly and without interruption.
Segue “to transition without interruption” is a loanword from Italian, in which it is the third-person singular form of seguire “to follow” in the present tense. In this way, “I follow” is seguo, “you follow” is segui, and “he follows” or “she follows” is segue. The infinitive seguire comes from Latin sequī “to follow.” What eventually happened in Vulgar Latin is that sequī became regularized as something like sequere before becoming French suivre, Italian seguire, and Spanish seguir. Note that Segway, the name of the personal vehicle, is based on a common misspelling of segue. Segue was first recorded in English in the early 1850s.
a sprout or shoot from the root of a plant, especially a sugarcane, after it has been cropped.
Ratoon “a sprout from the root of a plant” is likely anglicized from Spanish retoño “sprout,” which is based on the verb retoñar “to sprout again in the fall,” from re- “again” and otoño “fall, autumn.” Spanish otoño and English autumn together come from Latin autumnus, which is of uncertain origin, even stumping expert linguists! Among the few proposals are connections to the Etruscan language, to Latin augēre (stem auct-) “to increase,” or distantly to English sere “dry, withered” (compare archaic English sere month “August”). Old English hærfest “autumn” is the source of modern English harvest. Ratoon was first recorded in English circa 1630.
