Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

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adversity
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 16, 2025 is: adversity • \ad-VER-suh-tee\ • noun Adversity refers to a difficult situation or condition, or to a state of serious or continued difficulty or misfortune. // The soldiers were honored for acting with courage in the face of adversity. // The team overcame many adversities on their way to summiting the mountain. See the entry > Examples: “To foster self-reliance, colleges should focus on supports that empower students to face challenges. ... Instead of lowering demands to accommodate discomfort, institutions can create frameworks that help students cope, adapt and ultimately thrive in the face of adversity.” — Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, 11 Mar. 2025 Did you know? The world, alas, is full of adversity of all kinds, from misfortune to outright calamity. But while we—being humble lexicographers, not sagacious philosophers—cannot explain the source of such adversity, we can explain the source of the word adversity. If you’ve ever faced adversity and felt like fate, the world, or something else was turned against you, it will not surprise you that adversity traces back to the Latin verb advertere, meaning “to turn toward, direct,” itself a combination of the verb vertere, “to turn,” and the prefix ad-, “to.” The past participle of advertere is adversus, meaning “turned toward, facing, opposed,” which eventually led (via a couple languages in between) to the Middle English word adversite, meaning “opposition, hostility, misfortune, or hardship,” and the adversity we know today.
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pugnacious
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 15, 2025 is: pugnacious • \pug-NAY-shus\ • adjective Someone described as pugnacious shows a readiness or desire to fight or argue. // There's one pugnacious member on the committee who won't agree to anything. See the entry > Examples: "While looking through the Perkins telescope [at Saturn] one night, a pugnacious 10-year-old commented, 'Hey! I only see one ring. Rip off!'" — Tom Burns, The Delaware (Ohio) Gazette, 23 Oct. 2024 Did you know? Pugnacious individuals are often looking for a fight. While unpleasant, at least their fists are packing an etymological punch. Pugnacious comes from the Latin verb pugnare (meaning "to fight"), which in turn comes from the Latin word for "fist," pugnus. Another Latin word related to pugnus is pugil, meaning "boxer." Pugil is the source of our word pugilist, which means "fighter" and is used especially of professional boxers. Pugnare has also given us impugn ("to assail by words or arguments"), oppugn ("to fight against"), and repugnant (which is now used primarily in the sense of "exciting distaste or aversion," but which has also meant "characterized by contradictory opposition" and "hostile").
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druthers
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 14, 2025 is: druthers • \DRUH-therz\ • noun plural Druthers is an informal word that refers to the power or opportunity to choose—in other words, free choice. It is used especially in the phrase if one had one's druthers. // If I had my druthers, I would travel all the time. See the entry > Examples: “If I had my druthers, if I made the sequel to ‘Companion,’ it would just be a shot of her on the side of the road, cutting out her tracking chip and then cutting to her on a farm with a couple of million dollars.” — Drew Hancock, quoted in Variety, 1 Feb. 2025 Did you know? Nowadays, you’re much more likely to encounter the plural noun druthers than its singular forebear, but that wasn’t always the case. Druther, an alteration of “would rather” in some U.S. English dialects, first appeared in writing in the late 1800s. “Any way you druther have it, that is the way I druther have it,” says Huck to Tom in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Detective (a sequel to the more famous Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which also included the word druther). This example of metanalysis (the shifting of a sound from one element of a phrase to another) had been around for some time in everyday speech when Twain put those words in Huck’s mouth. By then, in fact, druthers had also become a plural noun, so Tom could reply, “There ain’t any druthers about it, Huck Finn; nobody said anything about druthers,” though druthers didn’t overtake druther in popularity (at least in print) until the mid-1900s.
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reminisce
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 13, 2025 is: reminisce • \rem-uh-NISS\ • verb To reminisce is to talk, think, or write about things that happened in the past. // After the official reunion dinner, the old friends gathered at a pub to reminisce about their high school days, now long past. See the entry > Examples: “Our parents would reminisce about their past happiness and point to the oversized photographic portrait taken of them at the county fair sometime in the mid-1970s, before we were born.” — Nora Lange, Us Fools, 2024 Did you know? Do you remember, say, the 21st night of September? Fantastic. Earth, Wind, and Fire does, too, on their classic hit from 1978, “September.” More than remember, the band reminisces—that is, they share details and express feelings about what they remember: dancing, a bell ringing, souls singing, et al. Reminisce distinguishes itself from words like remember and recollect by implying a casual recalling of experiences long past, often with a sense of nostalgia. Reminisce and its relatives reminiscence and reminiscent all trace back to the Latin verb reminisci, meaning “remember.” Reminisci in turn shares roots with mens, the Latin word for “mind.”
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gustatory
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 12, 2025 is: gustatory • \GUSS-tuh-tor-ee\ • adjective Gustatory describes things that are related to or associated with eating or the sense of taste. // The deli has been widely praised for its astonishing variety of gustatory delights. See the entry > Examples: "For those who have never experienced the gustatory pleasure, these cream puffs consist of freshly baked pastry shells generously covered with powdered sugar and bloated with chilled vanilla pudding that has been pumped into them." — Carl Hamilton, The Cecil Whig (Elkton, Maryland), 12 Feb. 2025 Did you know? Gustatory is a member of a finite set of words that describe the senses with which we encounter our world, the other members being visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile. Like its peers, gustatory has its roots in Latin—in this case, the Latin word gustare, meaning "to taste." Gustare is a direct ancestor of gustatory, gustation, meaning "the act or sensation of tasting," and degustation, meaning "the action or an instance of tasting especially in a series of small portions." More distant relatives of gustare include choose and disgust.
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