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.
a restaurant patterned on the cellar of a German town hall, usually located below street level.
Rathskeller “a restaurant patterned on the cellar of a German town hall,” which is spelled Ratskeller in modern German, is not related to rats. Instead, Rathskeller is based on Rathaus “town hall” (with the -aus cropped off) and Keller “cellar.” In Rathaus, the Rat- element means “advice, counsel” or “council” and is related to the names Conrad (literally meaning “brave advice”) and Ralph (earlier Radulf, literally “wolf advice”). The -haus part of Rathaus is a cognate of English house and is used much like how English features house in terms such as bathhouse, clubhouse, and coffeehouse simply to mean “building.” German Keller and English cellar both come from Latin cellārium “storeroom,” which is related to English cell (from Latin cella “room”). Rathskeller was first recorded in English in the early 1860s.
to wander aimlessly.
Stravage (also stravaig) “to wander aimlessly” may seem a little odd in its spelling and pronunciation, but the word has a far more familiar (and expensive) relative: extravagant “spending much more than is wise.” The reasoning here is that stravage is formed by shortening the Medieval Latin verb extrāvagarī “to wander out of bounds”—which also came into English as extravagate, of the same meaning—and English extravagant uses a more figurative sense of its Latin source, with the wandering beyond bounds based in finances rather than physically moving around. Latin extrāvagarī is based on extrā “outside” and vagarī “to wander,” which is the root of or related to vague, vagrant, and vagus (the name of a nerve). Stravage was first recorded in English in the first decade of the 19th century.
to utter a long, wailing cry; howl or screech.
The history of caterwaul “to utter a long, wailing cry” takes us down a bit of a linguistic rabbit hole. The term is a compound of two Middle English words: cater “tomcat” and either wawen “to howl” or waul, a variant of wail “to utter a mournful cry.” Cater is related to modern English cat, but while cat comes from Old English, cater may be a borrowing from Middle Dutch or Low German. While cat and its Germanic cousins (such as German Kater and Katze) are often considered to be early adaptations of Latin cattus “cat” (compare French chat and Spanish gato), an alternative opinion is that all these feline words are examples of a Wanderwort. As we learned from the recent Word of the Day matcha, a Wanderwort is a word that has spread across a long chain of unrelated languages, and this explains why the words for “cat” in languages such as Arabic (qiṭṭ) look familiar even though Arabic and English are not related. Caterwaul was first recorded in English in the late 14th century.
a temple or sacred building, usually a pyramidlike tower and typically having upward-curving roofs over the individual stories.
Pagoda “a temple or sacred building with upward-curving roofs” is an adaptation of Portuguese pagode “temple,” which is of uncertain origin, but there are two prevailing hypotheses. The first is a derivation from classical Persian butkada, in which but (modern Persian bot) means “idol” and derives from Buddha (that is, Sanskrit buddha “awakened”), while kada (modern Persian kade) is a noun of place variously meaning “temple, dwelling, village.” The second explanation is a connection to pagavadi (or pakavati) in Tamil, a language of Sri Lanka and southern India, and the term is borrowed from Sanskrit bhagavatī “goddess” (distantly related to the recent Words of the Day nebbish and baksheesh). In this way, both explanations for pagoda come back to the purpose of the building: a house for gods. Pagoda was first recorded in English circa 1630.
the act or process of learning during sleep by listening to recordings repeatedly.
Hypnopedia “learning during sleep by listening to recordings repeatedly” is a compound of the Ancient Greek nouns hýpnos “sleep” and paideía “child-rearing, education” (compare encyclopedia, from enkýklios paideía “circular education”). Hýpnos is the Ancient Greek cognate of Latin somnus “sleep”; because Ancient Greek and Latin are both Indo-European languages, the two languages share hundreds of cognates, and Ancient Greek h often corresponds to Latin s at the beginning of a word (compare hyper- and super-). Paideía comes from paîs (stem paid-) “child,” which is also the source of the combining form pedo- or ped- in pedantic, pediatrician, and pedology “the study of children.” Aldous Huxley is the first known user of hypnopedia in print and may have coined the term for his 1932 novel Brave New World.
