Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 24, 2019 is:

apposite • \AP-uh-zit\  • adjective

: highly pertinent or appropriate : apt

Examples:

Before sending the final draft of his novel to his editor, Lyle searched for an apposite quotation that could serve as the book's epigraph.

"He brings to the story a modern intelligence, a modern interest, as well as much apposite historical information. And the result is a refreshing, civilized book, a notable homage to its great original." — Frank Kermode, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2005

Did you know?

Apposite and opposite sound so much alike that you would expect them to have a common ancestor—and they do. It is the Latin verb ponere, which means "to put or place." Adding the prefix ad- to ponere led to apponere, meaning "to place near" or "to apply to," and that branch of the ponere family tree budded apposite. The word is used to describe something that applies well to or is very appropriate for something else. To get opposite, the prefix ob- was added to ponere, and that combinition matured into opponere, meaning "to place against or opposite." The related Latin verb componere, meaning "to put together," gave us compound and composite.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 23, 2019 is:

scavenger • \SKAV-un-jer\  • noun

1 chiefly British : a person employed to remove dirt and refuse from streets

2 : one that scavenges: such as

a : a garbage collector

b : a junk collector

c : a chemically active substance acting to make innocuous or remove an undesirable substance

3 : an organism that typically feeds on refuse or carrion

Examples:

My uncle, a habitual scavenger and clever handyman, found a broken exercise machine left on the curb and fixed it so that it works again.

"The 34-year-old scavenger has had to work longer and harder over the past year, underlining how a drastic decline in scrap metal and commodity prices has hurt even the poor who collect discarded metal to sell to scrap yards." — Brendan O'Brien, Reuters, 4 July 2016

Did you know?

You might guess that scavenger is a derivative of scavenge, but the reverse is actually true; scavenger is the older word, first appearing in English in the early 16th century, and the back-formation scavenge came into English in the mid-17th century. Scavenger is an alteration of the earlier scavager, itself from Anglo-French scawageour, meaning "collector of scavage." In medieval times, scavage was a tax levied by towns and cities on goods put up for sale by nonresidents in order to provide resident merchants with a competitive advantage. The officers in charge of collecting this tax were later made responsible for keeping streets clean, and that's how scavenger came to refer to a public sanitation employee in Great Britain before acquiring its current sense referring to a person who salvages discarded items.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 22, 2019 is:

peer-to-peer • \PEER-tuh-PEER\  • adjective

: relating to, using, or being a network by which computers operated by individuals can share information and resources directly without relying on a dedicated central server

Examples:

"PayPal announced a new mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payment platform called PayPal.me, which will allow users to create a personalized PayPal link and send it to peers for fast P2P transfers through PayPal." — Jaime Toplin and John Heggestuen, Business Insider, 1 Sep. 2015

"The figures come from a paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of New York's fintech conference in March, which found 27 percent of peer-to-peer lending dollars had displaced traditional bank lending." — Steven Harras, The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, 7 Apr. 2019

Did you know?

The term peer-to-peer is a relatively recent addition to the English language, being little more than a half-century old. In its earliest known uses from the 1960s, it referred to something that occurs directly between human peers, people who are similar in age, grade, or status. It can still be found in this use in phrases such as "peer-to-peer tutoring." With the emergence of computer networking, peer-to-peer began to be used in reference to a system of computers that are able to communicate directly with one another without the mediation of a centralized server. Since the turn of the 21st century, peer-to-peer lending—the borrowing and lending of money through online services—has become increasingly common. You might also encounter peer-to-peer in the techy abbreviated form P2P, as in "P2P networking."