Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

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fester
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 12, 2025 is: fester • \FESS-ter\ • verb Something that festers becomes worse as time passes. Fester can also mean, in the context of wounds, sores, etc., “to become painful and infected.” // We should deal with these problems now instead of allowing them to fester. See the entry > Examples: “Minor plumbing leaks left to fester have snowballed into water seeping down walls and out of light fixtures ...” — Devyani Chhetri, The Dallas Morning News, 11 Mar. 2025 Did you know? Both noun and verb forms of the English word fester come from the Latin noun fistula, meaning “pipe” or, less pleasantly, “fistulous ulcer.” Accordingly, the noun fester refers to a sore that forms or discharges pus, while the oldest sense of the verb fester means “to generate pus.” A boil, for example, is a festering infection of a hair follicle. Over time, the verb—as many words do—picked up a figurative sense, and fester began to be used not only for the worsening of a wound but for a worsening state, situation, etc.
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darling
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 11, 2025 is: darling • \DAHR-ling\ • noun Darling can refer to a dearly loved person or to someone who is liked very much by a person or group. It can also mean “a kind and helpful person” as in, “Be a darling and carry this inside for me, would you?” // Our baby grandchild is just the sweetest little darling. // The actor has become a darling of the entertainment industry in both film and music. See the entry > Examples: “Rocking a BAPE hoodie and a slight nervousness, Jorjiana performed a freestyle and her most popular song, ‘ILBB2.’ And then boom: There’s no such thing as an overnight success, but it did seem as if Jorjiana was a social media darling by the next day.” — Damien Scott, Billboard, 20 Feb. 2025 Did you know? The opening lines of the rock band Wilco’s song “My Darling,” sung from the perspective of a parent calming their sleepless child, demonstrate a very common use of the word darling: “Go back to sleep now, my darling / And I’ll keep all the bad dreams away.” Darling is an ancient word, traceable all the way back to the Old English noun dēorling, which was formed by attaching the suffix -ling to the adjective dēore, the ancestor of dear, which describes that which is regarded very affectionately or fondly, is highly valued or esteemed, or is beloved. Darling, as in “my darling,” is often used as a term of endearment, whether for a child or a sweetheart, but it can also be used as a synonym of the noun favorite, as in “the word darling has proven itself a darling of songwriters for many centuries.”
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uncanny
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 10, 2025 is: uncanny • \un-KAN-ee\ • adjective Uncanny is typically used to describe something that is strange or unusual in a way that is surprising or difficult to understand. It can also describe something that seems to have a supernatural character or origin. // The child has an uncanny ability to recognize streets and locations she's seen only once or twice before. // The lights suddenly flickered, and we were both overcome with an eerie, uncanny feeling. See the entry > Examples: "... as Nelson Moultrie walked through the cemetery and observed trees growing in ways that resemble the shapes of people, like one that bore an uncanny resemblance to a pair of legs, she said she's already felt the presence of the people buried there." — Laura Liebman, The Post & Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 21 Mar. 2025 Did you know? Uncanny describes that which unsettles us, such as disquieting observations, or mysterious situations and circumstances. Strip the word of its prefix, though, and you're left with canny, a word that can be used as a synonym for clever and prudent. While canny and uncanny don't appear to be antonyms, they both come from an early Scots word canny meaning "free from risk; wise, prudent, cautious." And in Scots, canny has for centuries had a secondary meaning more similar to that of its mysterious cousin: the Oxford English Dictionary defines a sense of the word used chiefly in negative constructions (e.g., “not canny”) to describe what is not safe to be involved with, or more broadly, what is not in accordance with what is right or natural, as in "the idea is not canny." Rather uncanny.
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gloss
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 9, 2025 is: gloss • \GLAHSS\ • verb To gloss a word or phrase is to provide its meaning, or in other words, to explain or define it. // Many unfamiliar terms are glossed in the book’s introduction. See the entry > Examples: “It is revealing that early dictionaries regularly defined equality as ‘conformity,’ or glossed the word, like Noah Webster did in 1806, as ‘likeness, evenness, uniformity.’” — Darrin M. McMahon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Apr. 2024 Did you know? If you’re the type of word nerd who finds poring over book glossaries to be the bee’s knees, we know you’ll get a buzz from this gloss of the verb gloss. To gloss something, such as a word or phrase, is to explain or define it. The noun gloss, it follows, refers to (among other things) a brief explanation of a word or expression. And a glossary of course is a collection of textual glosses, or of specialized terms, with their meanings. Both forms of gloss, as well as the word glossary, trace back to the Greek noun glôssa, meaning “tongue,” “language,” or “obscure word requiring explanation.” Another descendent of glôssa, the English noun glossa, refers not to a bee’s knees but to a bee’s tongue, or to the tongue of another insect.
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modicum
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 8, 2025 is: modicum • \MAH-dih-kum\ • noun Modicum is a formal word that means “a small amount.” It is almost always used with of. // The band enjoyed a modicum of success in the early 2010s before becoming an international sensation. See the entry > Examples: “Imagine, for example, that the gods decided to bestow upon Sisyphus a modicum of mercy. The rock, the hill, the never-ending, pointless labor all remained nonnegotiable as far as the gods were concerned, but the mercy of the gods was to change Sisyphus’s attitude to these things. … He is never happier than when rolling large boulders up steep hills, and the gods have offered him the eternal fulfillment of this strange desire.” — Mark Rowlands, The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life, 2024 Did you know? It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the English language has more than a modicum of words referring to a small amount of something—it has oodles, from smidgen to soupçon. But while modicum can be applied to countable or physical things (like words or salt) it is almost always applied instead to abstract concepts like respect, success, control, hope, dignity, or privacy. Modicum traces back to the Latin noun modus, meaning “measure,” which just so happens to be the ancestor of more than a modicum of English words, from moderate and modify to mold and commode.
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