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 person who is skilled in implementing creative ideas into practical form.
There must be many millions of people who watched the TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, which began airing in 1955, and these same fans of The Mickey Mouse Club may also associate the word imagineer with the designers of Walt Disney’s theme parks (the original Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955). Imagineer, a blend of imagine and engineer, however, predates Disneyland by a good dozen years, first appearing in print on 1 June 1942, just before the Battle of Midway, in the very darkest days of World War II, in an upbeat advertisement, “Postwar America … will be a great day for Imagineers.”
obstinate; willful.
Willyard (also spelled willyart) “obstinate, willful” is yet another Scots word designed to confound the English. Even the first syllable, will-, is misleading: it is not the English auxiliary verb will, used, for example, to form the future tense; nor is it the English noun will "the mental faculty, desire, purpose"; it is from the Old Norse adjective villr (stem vill-) “wild, false, bewildered, erring, perplexed, uncertain.” The second syllable, -yard or -yart, is anybody’s guess. Robert Burns uses the word once, “But, O! for Hogarth's magic pow'r, / To shew Sir Bardie's willyart glowr” (1786), which guarantees the word’s survival; Sir Walter Scott also used the word in his Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). Willyard entered English toward the end of the 16th century.
tending to promote peace or reconciliation; peaceful or conciliatory.
Irenic “peaceful, conciliatory” comes straight from Greek eirēnikós “belonging to peace,” a derivative of the noun eirḗnē. Eirḗnē was also the name of the Greek goddess of Peace, the name of an 8th-century Byzantine empress, and the name of several Christian saints, whence the English female name Irene. The bewildering number of dialect forms (irā́nā, irḗnā, ireinā, etc.) point to a non-Greek origin. Irenic entered English in the second half of the 19th century.
an environmental cue, as the length of daylight or the degree of temperature, that helps to regulate the cycles of an organism's biological clock.
Zeitgeber “an environmental cue, such as the length of daylight, that helps regulate the biological clock of an organism,” comes from German Zeitgeber, literally “time giver,” a compound of Zeit “time” (cognate with English tide) and Geber, an agent noun from the verb geben “to give” (cognate with English give). The German term is formed on the analogy of Taktgeber “electronic synchronization device, timer, metronome.” Takt and Zeit are near synonyms except that Takt is more narrowly applied to music and rhythm. Zeitgeber entered English in the late 1950s.
easily crumbled or reduced to powder; crumbly.
The English adjective friable comes from Middle French friable from Latin friābilis “easily crumbled, crumbly,” a derivative of the verb friāre “to break into small pieces, crumble.” Friāre is akin to the verb fricāre “to rub, chafe” (source of English friction) and the adjective frīvolus “worthless, trashy” (English frivolous). In the Olden Days, when studying Latin in high school was routine, some clever wag would reinvent for the millionth time the saying Sīc friat crustulum “Thus crumbles the cookie.” Friable entered English in the second half of the 16th century.
