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.
confused or unintelligible talk.
Galimatias, “confused or unintelligible talk,” is a masculine singular noun in French. It first appears in 1580 in an essay of Montaigne’s; it first appears in English in 1653 in a translation of Rabelais. Galimatias has no reliable etymology: scholars suggest a connection with gallimaufry “a hodgepodge, a jumble,” but these are just guesses.
perilous; dangerous.
Parlous and its variant perlous, meaning “dangerous,” are contractions of perilous, which dates from the end of the 13th century. Perilous comes from Old French perillus, perilous, perilleus (with many more spelling variants) “dangerous, hazardous,” from Latin perīculōsus. Parlous and perlous both entered English at about the same time, toward the end of the 14th century.
a system in which a person's progress is based on ability and talent rather than class privilege and wealth.
Meritocracy, “a system in which a person's progress is based on ability and talent rather than class privilege and wealth,” is a relatively recent word, dating from the mid-1950s; it’s a transparent combination of the noun merit and the common suffix -cracy “rule, government.” The term was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in his satirical work The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), which took aim at the British educational system. Much to Young's dismay, meritocracy was adopted into widespread use without a hint of irony. In 2001, Young wrote in The Guardian: "The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033."
light, playful banter or raillery.
Badinage “playful banter” is a French compound noun of badiner “to joke, trifle” and the noun suffix -age, naturalized in English. Badiner is a derivative of the noun badin “joker, banterer,” from the Provençal verb badar “to gape,” which in turn comes from unrecorded Vulgar Latin batāre “to yawn, gape.” Badinage entered English in the second half of the 17th century.
marshy; wet.
Plashy “marshy, wet” is a derivative of Middle English plash(e), plaice, place “pool of standing water, marshy area,” from Old English plæsc “pool of water, puddle.” The adjective suffix -y comes from Middle English -i, -ie, -y, from Old English -ig (compare the German suffix -ig), which is related to the Greek adjective suffix -ikos and Latin -icus. Plashy entered English in the mid-16th century.
