Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 20, 2019 is:

canker • \KANG-ker\  • verb

1 : to become infested with erosive or spreading sores

2 : to corrupt the spirit of

3 : to become corrupted

Examples:

"Nevertheless, the self-absorption into which the lovers fall and the death and transfiguration with which the action ends have often been thought of as symptoms of a disease that cankers the human condition." — Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero, 2004

"They want to talk. They want to get it off their chest. Some people have been holding onto these things for years, just cankering their soul, but they don't know where to say it." — Shannon Hale, quoted in The Deseret News, 12 Mar. 2018

Did you know?

Canker is commonly known as the name for a type of spreading sore that eats into the tissue—a use that obviously furnished the verb with both its medical and figurative senses. The word ultimately traces back to Latin cancer, which can refer to a crab or a malignant tumor. The Greeks have a similar word, karkinos, and according to the ancient Greek physician Galen, the tumor got its name from the way the swollen veins surrounding the affected part resembled a crab's limbs. Cancer was adopted into Old English, becoming canker in Middle English and eventually shifting in meaning to become a general term for ulcerations. Cancer itself was reintroduced to English later, first as a zodiacal word and then as a medical term.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 19, 2019 is:

orthography • \or-THAH-gruh-fee\  • noun

1 a : the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage

b : the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols

2 : a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling

Examples:

English orthography was not yet regularized in William Shakespeare's time, so words often had many different spellings.

"He had to finish his thesis … before leaving for a research job in Australia, where he planned to study aboriginal languages. I asked him to assess our little experiment. 'The grammar was easy,' he said. 'The orthography is a little difficult, and the verbs seemed chaotic.'" — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 3 Sept. 2018

Did you know?

"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!" That quote, ascribed to Andrew Jackson, might have been the motto of early English spelling. The concept of orthography (a term that derives from the Greek words orthos, meaning "right or true," and graphein, meaning "to write") was not something that really concerned people until the introduction of the printing press in England in the second half of the 15th century. From then on, English spelling became progressively more uniform and has remained fairly stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such as changing musick to music, that were championed by Noah Webster).

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 18, 2019 is:

parabolic • \pair-uh-BAH-lik\  • adjective

1 : expressed by or being a parable : allegorical

2 : of, having the form of, or relating to a curve formed by the intersection of a cone and a plane parallel to an element of the cone

Examples:

The batter launched the ball into a towering parabolic arc that carried it well over the center field fence.

"In 1937, [radio astronomer Grote] Reber built the world's first parabolic radio telescope in his backyard. The Reber Telescope was moved to the National Radio Observatory at Green Bank in the 1960s and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989." — Princeton Times (West Virginia), 21 Dec. 2018

Did you know?

The two distinct meanings of parabolic trace back to the development of Late Latin and New Latin. Late Latin is the Latin language used by writers in the third to sixth centuries. In that language, the word for "parable" was parabola—hence, the "parable" sense of parabolic. New Latin refers to the Latin used since the end of the medieval period, especially in regard to scientific description and classification. In New Latin, parabola names the same geometrical curve as it does in English. Both meanings of parabola were drawn from the Greek word for "comparison": parabolē.