Today’s word of the day is spoony, meaning “enamored in a silly or sentimental way” or “feebly sentimental; gushy.” Someone who manifests spooniness is also called a spoony or just a spoon.
Tag Archives: Word of the Day
Wordnik word of the day: palaver
Today’s word of the day is palaver, meaning “idle chatter” or “talk intended to charm or beguile.” It’s also a verb. It comes from the Portuguese palavra (though perhaps its Spanish cognate is more familiar to modern Angolophones: palabra), meaning “talk, speech, word.” The word seems to have been picked up by English sailors and travelers on the west coast of Africa, where Portuguese was the chief language spoken with Europeans.
Happy Dictionary Day! Our word of the day is dictionary!
In honor of Noah Webster’s birthday, also known as National Dictionary Day, today’s word of the day is dictionary.
A page from Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. More photos of it here.
Wordnik word of the day: dottle
Today’s word of the day is dottle, a small rounded lump or mass, especially the tobacco remaining in the bottom of a tobacco pipe after smoking, which is often put on the top of fresh tobacco when refilling.
Photo by Jack Shainsky under a Creative Commons license.
Wordnik word of the day: indicia
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.
Wordnik word of the day: jug-handled
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.”
Wordnik word of the day: daylight
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.