Tag Archives: wotd

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Wordnik word of the day: arenose

Today’s word of the day is arenose, an adjective meaning “full of sand” or “sandy.” It comes from the same Latin root as the word arena, which originally meant “a sandy place” and was often used to mean “a sand-strewn place of combat in an amphitheater.” It’s most often used to describe soil or land. James Bell in his Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara wrote in 1848, “The soil of the Fezzan oases is indeed mostly arenose, and the dates are nearly all impregnated with fine particles of sand, which takes place when they are ripe, and very much lowers their value.” Words that are approximateley synonymous with arenose include arenaceous, arenarious, arenilitic, and arenulous.

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Wordnik word of the day: mirliton

Today’s word of the day is mirliton, noun, a kind of musical toy into which one sings, hums, or speaks, producing a coarse, reedy sound. It resembles a kazoo. The word mirliton comes to English through Louisiana French, from standard French, in which it can refer to anything from a reed pipe, a party whistle such as those used at Carnival time, or any kind of rudimentary instrument. It shares its name with a type of edible gourd, which goes not only by the name mirliton, but also by chayote, christophene, sayote, choko, and others. The Christian Science Monitor has an article about one man’s attempt to bring the mirliton back to New Orleans.

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Wordnik word of the day: crotchet

Today’s word of the day is crotchet, noun, “an odd, whimsical, or stubborn notion.” It came to Middle English from the Old French, a diminutive form of croche. Most people know the more common adjective form, crotchety, “characterized by odd fancies or crotchets; fantastic or eccentric in thought; whimsical.” William Temple Hornaday used it to describe giraffes in The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: “Each one has its own headful of notions, and rarely will two be found quite alike in temperament and views of life. Some are sanguine and sensible, others are nervous, crotchety, and full of senseless fears.”

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Wordnik word of the day: rux

Today’s word of the day is rux, meaning “to bother; fret; work (oneself) up.” Origin unknown but perhaps related to ruction, “a vexation or annoyance; also, a disturbance; a row or rumpus,” ruckus, “a disturbance; a commotion,” or one meaning of ruck: “a crowd or throng; especially, a closely packed and indiscriminate crowd or mass of persons or things; a jam; a press,” also known as a loose scrum in rugby.

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Wordnik word of the day: slitheroo

Today’s word of the day is slitheroo, meaning “to slide with a slow gliding motion; slidder.” The verb slidder, in turn, means “to slip; slide; especially, to slide clumsily or in a gingerly, timorous way” or “to slide with interruption.” Naturally, both words are related to slither, slide, sled, sledge, and sleigh. Rudyard Kipling is one of few people to use the verb slitheroo in print, though thickness of dialect makes even normal language in Captains Courageous hard to decipher.

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Hurrah! We Have a Word-of-the-Day Widget!

Wordnik now has a word-of-the-day (henceforth WOTD) widget!


Wordnik WOTD widget


You can check it out and grab the code here.


With our new widget you can display the Wordnik WOTD on your blog or website, for the entertainment and edification of your readers!


If you’d rather follow the WOTD through RSS you can use this link. (You can also follow us on Twitter for WOTDs, interesting language links, and more.)


We’ve also added a new graph to some word pages—a punctuation profile!


Hurrah!


The punctuation profile gives you an idea of how often a word is followed by an exclamation point, a question mark, or a period at the end of a sentence, as compared with the average for all words.


As you can see, an exclamation like hurrah is more likely than average to be followed by an exclamation point, and less likely to be followed by a question mark.


The punctuation profiles are turning up some interesting conundrums: for instance, why is the tally of question marks so high for the word peanut?


peanut?


(It can’t all be because of Wordnik’s favorite movie…)


We hope you enjoy the words of the day and the punctuation profiles! If you’d like to email us suggestions for future WOTD candidates, you can do so at feedback@wordnik.com.

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Wordnik word of the day: witticaster

Today’s word of the day is witticaster, “an inferior or pretended wit; a witling.” In other words, someone who thinks they’re funny even though they’re not. The word is formed by a combination of witty + -aster, the latter part a suffix that indicates approximation, rough similarity, or pretended resemblance. You may have seen it in poetaster, “a petty poet: a feeble rimester, or a writer of indifferent verses,” but it also occurs in a number of less common words. A philsophaster is “a pretender to philosophical knowledge; an incompetent philosopher.” A criticaster is “an inferior or incompetent critic; a petty censurer.” A grammaticaster is “a petty or pitiful grammarian; one who insists upon the minutest grammatical niceties.” A politicaster is “a petty politician; a pretender to political knowledge or influence.” A medicaster is “a pretender to medical knowledge or skill; an ignorant doctor.” A theologaster is “a quack in theology; a shallow or pretended theologian.” Of a slightly different nature—referring to something other than a person—are parasitaster, “an insignificant parasite,” oleaster, a type of wild tree that looks like a type of cultivated olive tree but isn’t, and verticillaster, a flowering part of a plant that looks whorl-like but isn’t a true whorl.