A word of the day each weekday from Wordnik!
Today’s word of the day is indicia, a plural noun meaning “identifying marks” or “indications.” It’s a favorite of legal minds: “If the defendant is dishonorable, it can take advantage of this window by doing everything possible to cover its tracks; documents will be shredded, electronic evidence will be scrubbed, and any other indicia of wrongdoing will disappear.” It’s from the Latin plural of indicium, a notice, information, discovery, sign, mark, token.
Today’s word of the day is jug-handled, meaning “one-sided,” as in, “I think that courtesy, like reciprocity, should not be jug-handled.”
An uncommon meaning of daylight makes it today’s word of the day. Daylight is a way of saying “the space between two things,” such as in automobile racing. It’s also the space left in a wine glass between the liquor and the brim. There was a time, when people drank bumpers—a bumper being a cup or glass brimming with alcohol (and related, of course, to bumper crop)— that the toastmaster would call out, “Are the glasses full? —no daylights—no heeltaps—tops and bottoms—not so much as would blind a midge’s eye is to be left.” In other words, he wanted to make sure the glasses were topped off and that every drop was downed to show that the attendees wholeheartedly endorsed the toasts.
If you’d like to suggest a word of the day, email us at wotd@wordnik.com.
Today’s word of the day is sawder, used especially in the phrase soft sawder to mean “blarney” or “nonsense.” It is a pronunciation-spelling of solder, which is a meltable, malleable metal alloy which is heated used to join metallic parts, such as in electronic gear. If you have a soft solder, then you likely have a badly made circuit or seam. In Willis the Pilot: A Sequel to the Swiss Family Robinson (1858), Paul Adrien uses it this way: “A Frenchman I once met […] firmly believed the Yankees lived on a soup made of bunkum and soft-sawder.” A synonym is soft soap.
Today’s word of the day is luna moth, which is described by The Century Dictionary as “the most beautiful of North American insects, of a light-green color relieved by luniform eye-spots and by a broad purplish-brown or liliaceous anterior border.” There are many photos of this beautiful insect on the entry’s Flickr page. The caterpillar is kind of amazing, too, though you need to be sure that’s what you have!
Today’s word of the day is pluck. Naturally, if we’re going to choose a word that seems so ordinary, we’re going to tell you about a meaning that isn’t. This pluck is the heart, liver, windpipe, and lungs of a sheep, ox, or other animal used as butchers’ meat. It’s also used figuratively or humorously for similar parts of a human being, especially when talking about “having the pluck” or “being plucky,” meaning, “showing courage and spirit in trying circumstances” or “being bold or brave.” In other words, “having the guts or the stomach to do something” or “showing intestinal fortitude.”
Why doesn’t anyone ever say, “He has the belly button to do what’s right?”
Today’s word of the day is sumph, a Scots and English dialect word meaning “dunce or blockhead.” Such a person is sumphish and practices sumphishness. Other lesser-known terms meaning “dunce or blockhead” are boodle, cabbage-head, clodpoll, dizzard, duncepoll, funge, gaby, goff, gomerel, grouthead, groutnoll, leatherhead, loggerhead, niddy, and pigsconce.