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.
acceptable or legitimate.
Cromulent, “acceptable, legitimate,” was first used in an episode of The Simpsons in 1996. When Edna Krabappel, the fourth-grade teacher, remarks, “'Embiggens’? Hm, I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield,” Elizabeth Hoover, the second-grade teacher, answers, “I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.” Cromulent began as a facetious formation of an arbitrary “root” crom- and the English adjective suffix -ulent (from Latin -ulentus “full of”). Cromulent began as a facetious formation but is now at the brink of “cromulence,” as happened earlier with Lewis Carroll’s chortle, frabjous, and galumph.
deserved reward or just deserts, usually unpleasant.
Comeuppance “just deserts, usually unpleasant,” is an Americanism that first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1859. The word derives from the phrasal verb come up, as a case for judgment at a trial, and the common suffix -ance, which forms nouns from verbs, such as acceptance from accept, or appearance from appear.
the willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.
Verbicide, “the willful distortion of the original meaning of a word; a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word,” comes from Latin verbum “word” and the English suffix -cide, a borrowing of the Latin suffixes -cīda “killer” and -cīdium “act of killing,” derivatives of the verb caedere “to cut down, strike, kill.” The willful distortion is usually something as harmless as a pun, or the weakening of the meanings of words like awful, awesome, divine, and ghastly (which occurs in all languages), as opposed to the perversion of language, especially political language, condemned by everyone from Thucydides in the 5th century b.c., to George Orwell in the mid-20th century. Verbicide entered English in the first half of the 19th century.
to continue or last permanently; endure.
The verb perdure, “to continue or last permanently; endure to the end,” comes via Middle English perduren “to continue, persist” and Old French perdurer, pardurer “to last to the end,” from Latin perdūrāre “to persist, survive, carry on, hold out, endure to the end.” Perdūrāre is a compound of the prefix per-, here used as an intensive, and the simple verb dūrāre “to make or become hard, harden, steel oneself,” a derivative of the adjective dūrus “hard, firm; harsh, (taste) strong (taste); stubborn.” Perdure entered English in the 15th century.
meanly economical; parsimonious; stingy.
The adjective cheeseparing means “parsimonious, stingy”; as a noun, cheeseparing has the related meanings “something of little or no value; stinginess, miserliness.” The term dates from the second half of the 16th century; by 1600 Shakespeare uses the term in Henry IV Part 2 where Falstaff remarks about Justice Shallow: “… like a man made after supper of a cheese paring,” i.e., thin slices of cheese cut or pared from a larger block. This original, literal meaning is obsolete today. By 1800 cheeseparing developed the sense “something scanty, inadequate, thin,” and by the 1830s, the sense “miserly economizing; stinginess; miserliness.” The adjective sense developed in the 1850s.
