Word of the Day

Verisimilitude, “the appearance or semblance of truth; probability,” comes via French similitude from Latin vērīsimilitūdō (also written as an open compound vērī similitūdō), an uncommon noun meaning “probability, plausibility,” literally “resemblance to the truth.” Similitūdō is a derivative of the adjective similis “like, resembling, similar,” which governs the genitive case. Vērī is the genitive singular of vērum, a noun use of the neuter gender of the adjective vērus “true, real.” Vera, the female personal name, is the feminine singular of vērus and is related to the Slavic (Russian) female name Vera, which is also used as a common noun (vera) meaning “faith, good faith, trust.” The Latin and Slavic forms come from a Proto-Indo-European root wer-, werǝ-, wēr- “true, trustworthy.” In Germanic wērā became Vār in Old Norse, the goddess of faithful oaths. Verisimilitude entered English in the early 17th century.

Legerity, “mental or physical agility,” comes from Middle French legereté “lightness, thoughtlessness,” a derivative of leger, liger “light (in weight).” Leger is a regular French phonological development of Vulgar Latin leviārius “light (in weight),” equivalent to Latin levis. The original and now obsolete English meaning of legerity was “lack of seriousness, frivolity” (its French sense). The current sense “nimbleness, quickness” dates from the end of the 16th century.

Scofflaw, a transparent compound of the verb scoff “to deride, mock” and the noun law, was originally an Americanism coined during Prohibition. In 1923 Delcevare King, a wealthy prohibitionist from Quincy, Massachusetts, offered $200 in a contest for a word that best described "a lawless drinker of illegally made or illegally obtained liquor." On January 15, 1924, the Boston Herald declared scofflaw the winner. Scofflaw had been submitted by Henry Dale and Kate Butler, two of the 25,000 contestants, who shared the prize.

Gorp, “trail mix,” was originally and still is mostly an American colloquialism dating from the 1950s. There is no satisfactory etymology for gorp (one common but improbable etymology interprets gorp as an acronym for good old raisins and peanuts; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the verb gorp, “to eat greedily,” dates to 1913).

Kindred as a noun means “one’s relatives, kinfolk”; as an adjective, “sharing beliefs, attitudes, or feelings.” Kindred comes from Middle English kinrede, which has many, many spelling variants. Kinrede is a compound of kin and the obsolete suffix -red, -rede, which forms nouns from other nouns. Kin comes from the Old English noun cynn “sort, kind,” from the Proto-Indo-European root gen-, gon- (with many variants) “to beget, give birth.” Cynn is related to Latin genus (plural genera) “birth, descent, origin, kind” (genus and genera are current in English), Greek génesis “origin” (English genesis comes from Greek via the Latin Bible). The Middle English suffix -red, -rede comes from Old English -rǣden, a noun and suffix meaning “condition” (hatred is the only other frequent noun in English with the suffix -red). The spelling kindred with internal d first appears about 1400 and has two possible origins: It may either be epenthetic, intrusive, a glide consonant between the n and r, or the d may be from the influence of the noun kind “nature, type, class." Kindred entered English in the early 13th century.