Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

• flounder

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 20, 2025 is: flounder • \FLOUN-der\ • verb To flounder is to struggle, whether that struggle is about moving or obtaining footing (as in “horses floundering through deep snow”) or about knowing what to do or say. // Caught off-guard by the reporter’s question, the mayor floundered for a few moments before remembering the talking points he had rehearsed. See the entry > Examples: “In those early days we floundered in a city we didn’t know. Tottenham in 1992 wasn’t the London we’d imagined. There were no top hats, no smog, no Holmes, no Watson, no ladies, no gents, and no afternoon tea. Not for us. We lived in a different London. In our London, people swore and spat, drank, quarreled, and laughed in fretful bursts. They spoke strange words in accents we couldn’t parse.” — Leo Vardiashvili, Hard By a Great Forest, 2024 Did you know? There’s nothing fishy about flounder... the verb, that is. While the noun referring to a common food fish is of Scandinavian origin, the verb flounder, which dates to the late 16th century, is likely an alteration of an older verb, founder. The two verbs have been confused ever since. Today, founder is most often used as a synonym of fail, or, in contexts involving a waterborne vessel, as a word meaning “to fill with water and sink.” Formerly, it was also frequently applied when a horse stumbled badly and was unable to keep walking. It’s likely this sense of founder led to the original and now-obsolete meaning of flounder: “to stumble.” In modern use, flounder typically means “to struggle” or “to act clumsily”; the word lacks the finality of founder, which usually suggests complete collapse or failure, as that of a sinking ship.

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• obtuse

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 19, 2025 is: obtuse • \ahb-TOOSS\ • adjective Obtuse is a formal word that describes someone who is not able to think clearly or to understand what is obvious or simple. It can also suggest a refusal to see something apparent to others, or a willful ignorance of or insensitivity to the real facts of a situation. Obtuse can also describe something that is difficult to understand because it is unclear or imprecise. // They were too obtuse to take a hint. // The text is poorly written and downright obtuse. See the entry > Examples: “Engineers love complicated problems, but we have a reputation for being obtuse about personal interactions. I often tell my fellow engineers, ‘You won't find any problems more complicated than those involving people.’” — Bill Austin, Inc.com, 15 Jan. 2025 Did you know? There’s a lot to understand about obtuse, so we’ll get straight to the point. Obtuse comes from a Latin word, obtusus, meaning “dull” or “blunt.” It can describe a geometric angle that is not acute (in other words one that exceeds 90 degrees but is less than 180 degrees), a leaf that is rounded at its free end, or a person who isn’t thinking clearly or who otherwise refuses to see something apparent to others—if someone asks you if you’re being obtuse about something, they are not paying you a compliment. Another common sense (no pun intended) of obtuse related to apprehension is “hard to comprehend,” often applied to speech or writing that isn’t clearly expressed or thought out. This sense may have developed due to the influence of two similar-sounding words: abstruse, a formal word that also means “hard to comprehend,” and obscure, a word that can mean, among other things, “not readily understood or clearly expressed.”

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• chutzpah

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 18, 2025 is: chutzpah • \KHOOTS-puh\ • noun Chutzpah is audacious boldness often paired with reckless self-confidence. Someone with chutzpah dares to do or say things that seem shocking to others. // It took a lot of chutzpah to stand up to her boss the way she did. See the entry >1. list text here Examples: “... [Anne] Hathaway is not easily talked out of things she believes in. She took drama classes, understudied future Tony winner Laura Benanti in a production of Jane Eyre at 14, and had the chutzpah to write to an agent with her headshot at 15.” — Julie Miller, Vanity Fair, 25 Mar. 2024 Did you know? The word chutzpah has been boldly circulating through English since the mid-1800s. It comes from the Yiddish word khutspe, which comes in turn from the Hebrew word ḥuṣpāh. The ch in chutzpah indicates a rasping sound from the back of the throat that exists in many languages, including Yiddish. That sound is not part of English phonology, so it follows that the c is sometimes dropped in both the pronunciation and spelling of the word. Some speakers of Yiddish feel that chutzpah has been diluted in English use, no longer properly conveying the monumental nature of the gall that is implied. A classic example can be found in Leo Rosten’s 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish, which defines chutzpah as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

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• pertain

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 17, 2025 is: pertain • \per-TAYN\ • verb To pertain to someone or something is to relate, refer, or have a connection to that person or thing. // That law pertains only to people who live in this state. See the entry > Examples: "There are certain rules of conduct that pertain to office dressing no matter how lax your HR department may be. No shirt, no shoes, no job. But keeping it professional doesn’t have to mean feeling stuffy or boring ..." — Aemilia Madden, The Cut, 20 Nov. 2024 Did you know? Pertain comes to English via Anglo-French from the Latin verb pertinēre, meaning "to reach to" or "to belong." Pertinēre, in turn, was formed by combining the prefix per- (meaning "through") and tenēre ("to hold"). Tenēre is a popular root in English words and often manifests with the -tain spelling that can be seen in pertain. Other descendants include abstain, contain, detain, maintain, obtain, retain, and sustain, to name a few of the more common ones. Not every -tain word has tenēre in its ancestry, though. Ascertain, attain, and certain are certainly exceptions. And a few tenēre words don't follow the usual pattern: tenacious and tenure are two.

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• non sequitur

  Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 16, 2025 is: non sequitur • \NAHN-SEK-wuh-ter\ • noun A non sequitur is a statement that either does not logically follow from, or is not clearly related to, what was previously said. // We were talking about the new restaurant when she threw in some non sequitur about her dog. See the entry > Examples: “Late on Saturday, as members of Congress scrambled to strike a deal for legislation that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling, they agreed to a total non sequitur in the text they would release the next day. After a series of late-in-the-game interventions by lobbyists and energy executives, the draft bill declared the construction and operation of a natural gas pipeline to be ‘required in the national interest.’ It wasn’t really germane to the debt ceiling, at least not in the literal sense.” — Jonathan Mingle, The New York Times, 1 June 2023 Did you know? Non sequitur comes directly from Latin, in which language it means “it does not follow.” Although the Latin non sequitur can constitute a phrase or even a complete sentence, in English non sequitur is a noun, and thus it follows that the plural of non sequitur is non sequiturs. Borrowed into English in the 16th century by logicians, non sequitur initially referred to a conclusion that did not follow the statements preceding it. The meaning has now broadened to include statements that are seemingly unrelated to the topic at hand, or that seem to come out of the blue. So if you ever forget the definition of non sequitur, just remember: a penny saved is a penny earned.

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