Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 17, 2025 is: apprehension • \ap-rih-HEN-shun\ • noun Apprehension most often refers to the fear that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen; it’s a feeling of being worried about the future. The word can also refer to seizure by legal process. // There is growing apprehension that next quarter’s profits will be lower than expected. See the entry > Examples: “Mark Pope felt uncertain. There was a moment, he admitted, after it was clear that he was Kentucky’s choice, when he stood alone at home and grappled with apprehension about a job that offered both spoils he knew well and obstacles, too.” — Myron Medcalf, ESPN, 12 Nov. 2024 Did you know? There’s quite a bit to comprehend about apprehension, so let’s take a closer look at its history. The Latin ancestor of apprehension (and of comprehend, prehensile, and even prison, among others) is the verb prehendere, meaning “to grasp” or “to seize.” When it was first used in the 14th century, apprehension could refer to the act of learning, a sense that is now obsolete, or the ability or power to understand things—learning and understanding both being ways to “grasp” knowledge or information. It wasn’t until the late 16th century that apprehension was used, as it still is today, for the physical seizure of something or someone (as an arrest). The most commonly used sense of apprehension today refers to a feeling that something bad is about to happen, when you seize up, perhaps, with anxiety or dread, having grasped all the unpleasant possibilities.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 16, 2025 is: parlay • \PAHR-lay\ • verb To parlay something is to use or develop it in order to get something else of greater value. Parlay is often used with the word into. // He hoped to parlay his basketball skills into a college scholarship. // She parlayed $5,000 and years of hard work into a multimillion-dollar company. See the entry > Examples: “Sometimes, celebrities parlay their name and following into big-time sales and hype—though, of course, not all of them (or their projects) are created equal.” — Lora Kelley, The Atlantic, 26 Nov. 2024 Did you know? The word parlay originally belonged exclusively to gambling parlance, where to parlay is to take winnings from a previous bet, along with one’s original stake of money, and use them to make another bet or series of bets. The verb comes from the noun paroli, a borrowing from French—itself borrowed from Italian—that refers to a system of such betting. After decades of this specific use, not only did parlay start to be used as a noun synonymous with paroli, but English speakers upped the ante by using the verb figuratively in situations where someone uses or develops something—such as a skill or hard work—for the purpose of getting something else of even greater value.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 15, 2025 is: hackneyed • \HAK-need\ • adjective Something is considered hackneyed when it is not interesting, funny, etc., because of being used too often; in other words, it's neither fresh nor original. // The new crime drama's characters are shallow stereotypes who engage one another in hackneyed dialogue. See the entry > Examples: “Any positive lesson here is lost in all the hackneyed jokes, and by the end the movie falls apart entirely.” — Tim Grierson, Vulture, 4 May 2024 Did you know? In his 1926 tome A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, lexicographer H. W. Fowler offers a good deal of advice under the heading “Hackneyed Phrases.” While some of the phrases he cautions against (“too funny for words,” “my better half”) will be familiar to most readers today, others (such as “hinc illae lacrimae”) have mostly fallen into obscurity. Fowler was not the first usage writer to warn against the overuse of hackneyed (that is, trite or clichéd) phrases; a number of authors in the late 19th and early 20th century had similarly (hackneyed phrase alert) taken up the cudgels against trite and banal turns of phrase. In 1897, for example, Frederic Lawrence Knowles advised against using “agitate the tintinnabulatory,” and in 1917 Margaret Ashmun and Gerhard Lomer discouraged “the dreamy mazes of the waltz.” Were these hackneyed phrases so objected to that they became obsolete? This is unlikely, as the same manuals which object to long-dead expressions also object to “blushing bride,” “bated breath,” and “one fell swoop,” all of which have survived. Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that phrases come and go with time. This is, in a way, a pleasant explanation, for it means that the seemingly ubiquitous phrase you detest stands a fair chance of, ahem, falling by the wayside. Only time will tell, as they say.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 14, 2025 is: deus ex machina • \DAY-us-eks-MAH-kih-nuh\ • noun A deus ex machina is a character or thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel, play, movie, etc., and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve. // The introduction of a new love interest in the final act was the perfect deus ex machina for the main character's happy ending. See the entry > Examples: "The poultry thieves in Emma provide a particularly humorous example of deus ex machina: the arrival of a poultry thief into the surrounding area (on the penultimate page of the novel, no less) and his theft of Mrs. Weston’s turkeys frightens Mr. Woodhouse enough to consent to Emma’s marriage and to allow Mr. Knightley to move into Hartfield." — Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness, 2024 Did you know? The New Latin term deus ex machina is a translation of a Greek phrase and means literally "a god from a machine." Machine, in this case, refers to the crane (yes, crane) that held a god over the stage in ancient Greek and Roman drama. The practice of introducing a god at the end of a play to unravel and resolve the plot dates from at least the 5th century B.C.; Euripides (circa 484-406 B.C.) was one playwright who made frequent use of the device. Since the late 1600s, deus ex machina has been applied in English to unlikely saviors and improbable events in fiction or drama that bring order out of chaos in sudden and surprising ways.