Episodes
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 8, 2025 is:
exemplary • \ig-ZEM-pluh-ree\ • adjective
Something described as exemplary is extremely good and deserves to be admired and copied.
// Our research team was awarded for our exemplary work on the project.
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Examples:
â[Director, Oliver] Hermanus again shows highly polished craftsmanship, adding the subtlest hint of sepia tones to evoke the period in the early sections, but never to the point where the characters compete with the settings. His direction of the actors is exemplary, even with characters seen only briefly ...â â David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 21 May 2025
Did you know?
Itâs usually not a good thing if someone wants to make an example of you, unless, of course, itâs because you happen to be exemplary. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, someone or something may be deemed exemplary if they, by their example, are worthy of imitation. Like a few other English words beginning with exâsuch as exceptional and extraordinaryâexemplary describes that which is a cut above the rest. But though exemplary, which comes from the Latin noun exemplum (âexampleâ), describes something âexcellent,â it almost always carries the further suggestion that the thing described is an excellent model to follow.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 7, 2025 is:
procrastinate • \pruh-KRASS-tuh-nayt\ • verb
To procrastinate is to be slow or late about doing something that should be done, or about doing or attending to things in general.
// Tickets to the event are selling swiftly, so don't procrastinateâbuy yours today.
// Not one to procrastinate, Harry set to work on the project immediately.
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Examples:
"Researchers found that individuals who tend to procrastinate often do so because they fear not meeting their high standards or worry too much about failing. The study also showed that this fear of failure and the habit of overgeneralizing failures (like thinking one mistake means you're a failure) strongly connect perfectionism to procrastination." â Mark Travers, Forbes, 28 May 2025
Did you know?
We won't put off telling you about the origins of procrastinate: it comes from the Latin prefix pro-, meaning "forward," and crastinus, meaning "of tomorrow." To procrastinate is to work or move slowly so as to fall behind; it implies blameworthy delay especially through laziness or apathy. English has other words with similar meanings, such as defer and postpone, but none places the blame so directly on the person responsible for choosing a later time to do something. Procrastinate is also a malleable word: English speakers have wasted no time creating clever variations, most of them delightfully self-explanatory. Don't let coinages like procrastibake, procrastinetflix, and procrasticlean pass you by; they may not meet our criteria for entry into the dictionary, but their potentials for use are undeniable.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 6, 2025 is:
antic • \AN-tik\ • noun
Antic refers to an attention-drawing, often wildly playful or funny act or action. It is usually used in its plural form, and is often used disapprovingly.
// It wasn't clear which students were ultimately responsible for the antics that unfolded in the cafeteria that day.
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Examples:
âA couple of adult gorillas, including one majestic silverback, lay indolently on the groundâseemingly reveling in the early morning sunshine, while a pair of young gorillas tumbled down from a mound and played together on the muddy earth. It was remarkable to see how similar they are to humans. They live in family groups and their movements, antics and expressions are so like ours. In fact, data shows that humans and gorillas differ in only 1.75 per cent of their DNA, far less than previously assumed. (Chimpanzeesâour closest relativesâdiffer only 1.37 per cent from our genomes.)â â Zeineb Badawi, An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence, 2025
Did you know?
When referring to one of the grotesquesâthe fanciful, often fantastical mural paintings found in the ruins of ancient Roman buildingsâthe Italian descendants of the ancient Romans used the word antico, meaning âancient thing.â In 16th-century English, antico (itself a descendant of the Latin word for âancient,â antiquus) became antic, and got applied as both a noun and an adjective in contexts related to decorative artâsculptures, painting, architecture, etc.âinspired by the original grotesques. Antic shifted in meaning over time, eventually gaining the senses we use more often today: antic as an adjective describes the absurd or whimsical, and antic as a usually plural noun refers to attention-grabbing, playful or funny acts and actions.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 5, 2025 is:
cantankerous • \kan-TANK-uh-rus\ • adjective
A cantankerous person is often angry and annoyed, and a cantankerous animal or thing is difficult or irritating to deal with.
// Although the former postman was regarded by some townspeople as a scowling, cantankerous old coot, he was beloved by neighborhood children, to whom he would regularly hand out butterscotch candies from his front stoop with a twinkle in his eye.
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Examples:
âThe film âHard Truths,â which opens in New York on Friday and nationwide in January, centers on [Marianne] Jean-Baptisteâs Pansy, a cantankerous middle-aged woman who spits venom at unsuspecting shop assistants, bald babies, her 20-something son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and her dentist, among others.â â Simran Hans, The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2024
Did you know?
A person described as cantankerous may find it more difficult than most to turn that frown upside down, while a cantankerous mule/jalopy/etc. is difficult to deal withâit may not turn in your desired direction. Itâs been speculated that cantankerous is a product of the obsolete word contack, meaning âcontention,â under the influence of a pair of âdifficultâ words still in use: rancorous and cankerous. Rancorous brings the anger and âbitter deep-seated ill willâ (as rancor can be understood to mean), and cankerous brings the perhaps understandable foul mood: a cankerous person suffers from painful soresâthat is, cankers.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 4, 2025 is:
Yankee • \YANG-kee\ • noun
Yankee can refer broadly to anyone born or living in the U.S., more narrowly to only those in the northern U.S., or even more narrowly to only those in the states of New England. The broadest use is especially common outside the U.S.
// It took the children some time to adjust to being the only Southerners in a classroom full of Yankees.
// After years of international travel, he'd grown accustomed to living as a Yankee abroad.
See the entry >
Examples:
"Anthony Pettaway's coworkers at Norfab Ducting have known for the past six years he was good at getting their deliveries to the right department. They also knew from his accent that the receivables department employee was a relocated Yankee." â Jill Doss-Raines, The Dispatch (Lexington, NC), 10 June 2025
Did you know?
We don't know the origin of Yankee but we do know that it began as an insult. British General James Wolfe used the term in a 1758 letter to express his low opinion of the New England troops assigned to him, and from around the same time period there is a report of British troops using Yankee as a term of abuse for the citizens of Boston. In 1775, however, after the battles of Lexington and Concord showed that colonials could stand up to British regulars, Yankee was proudly adopted by colonials as a self-descriptor in defiance of the pejorative use. Both derisive and respectable uses have existed ever since.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 3, 2025 is:
desultory • \DEH-sul-tor-ee\ • adjective
Desultory is a formal word used to describe something that lacks a plan or purpose, or that occurs without regularity. It can also describe something unconnected to a main subject, or something that is disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.
// After graduation, I moved from job to job in a more or less desultory manner before finding work I liked.
// The team failed to cohere over the course of the season, stumbling to a desultory fifth place finish.
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Examples:
âOne other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, heâd been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if Iâd done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way.â â Justin St. Germain, âThe Memoirist and the Lie Detector,â New England Review, 2024
Did you know?
The Latin adjective desultorius was used by the ancient Romans to describe a circus performer (called a desultor) whose trick was to leap from horse to horse without stopping. English speakers took the idea of the desultorius performer and coined the word desultory to describe that which figuratively âjumpsâ from one thing to another, without regularity, and showing no sign of a plan or purpose. (Both desultor and desultorius, by the way, come from the Latin verb salire, meaning âto leap.â) A desultory conversation leaps from one topic to another, and a desultory comment is one that jumps away from the topic at hand. Meanwhile a desultory performance is one resulting from an implied lack of steady, focused effort.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 2, 2025 is:
galumph • \guh-LUMF\ • verb
To galumph is to move in a loud and clumsy way.
// I could hear them galumphing around in the attic in search of old family photo albums.
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Examples:
âDragons! Dragons roaring! Dragons squawking! Dragons sizing each other up! Dragons galumphing over the sand so awkwardly it reminds you that dragons are creatures of the air, not the earth.â â Glen Weldon, NPR, 28 July 2024
Did you know?
Bump, thump, thud. Thereâs no doubt about itâwhen someone or something galumphs onto the scene, ears take notice. Galumph first lumbered onto the English scene in 1872 when Lewis Carroll used the word to describe the actions of the vanquisher of the Jabberwock in Through the Looking Glass: âHe left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.â Carroll likely constructed the word by splicing gallop and triumphant, as galumph did in its earliest uses convey a sense of exultant bounding. Other 19th-century writers must have liked the sound of galumph, because they began plying it in their own prose, and it has been clumping around our language ever since.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 1, 2025 is:
verbose • \ver-BOHSS\ • adjective
Someone described as verbose tends to use many words to convey their point. Verbose can also describe something, such as a speech, that contains more words than necessary.
// The article documenting their meeting presented an odd exchange between a verbose questioner and a laconic interviewee.
See the entry >
Examples:
"The dense, verbose textâover which some actors stumbled, understandably, on opening nightâcreated a dizzying journey through a war between gods and mortals fought across time and place." â Rosa Cartagena, The Philadelphia Daily News, 19 Feb. 2025
Did you know?
There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. Diffuse, long-winded, prolix, redundant, windy, repetitive, rambling, and circumlocutory are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try succinct, concise, brief, short, summary, terse, compact, or compendious. Verbose, which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from the Latin adjective verbĆsus, from verbum, meaning "word." Other descendants of verbum include verb, adverb, proverb, verbal, and verbicide ("the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word").
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 30, 2025 is:
expunge • \ik-SPUNJ\ • verb
To expunge something is to remove it completely, whether by obliterating it, striking it out, or marking it for deletion. Expunge is most commonly applied in cases in which documentation of something is removed from an official record.
// Due to an error, the charges were expunged from their record.
See the entry >
Examples:
â... Bland et al. found that an offer to expunge a criminal record after participation in a rehabilitation program reduced crime as well as the measure of harm. This appears to indicate that motivation drives rehabilitationâwhich is important to consider in judging character in the present.â â Wendy L. Patrick, Psychology Today, 1 Dec. 2024
Did you know?
In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a series of dots was used to mark mistakes or to label material that should be deleted from a text, and those deletion dotsâknown as puncta delentiaâcan help you remember the history of expunge. Puncta comes from the Latin verb pungere, which can be translated as âto prick or stingâ (and you can imagine that a scribe may have felt stung when their mistakes were so punctuated in a manuscript). Pungere is also an ancestor of expunge, as well as a parent of other dotted, pointed, or stinging terms such as punctuate, compunction, poignant, puncture, and pungent.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 29, 2025 is:
impetus • \IM-puh-tus\ • noun
Impetus refers to a force or impulse that causes something (such as a process or activity) to be done or to become more active. It is often used with for and sometimes with to.
// Her work provided the major impetus behind the movement.
// The tragic accident became an impetus for changing the safety regulations.
// The high salary and generous benefits package were impetus enough to apply for the job.
See the entry >
Examples:
â... using the many tools now available, I built a family tree with over twelve hundred names of people living in some two dozen countries. If there is anything approaching a single story of humanity, it is surely one of movement, whatever the impetus.â â Diana McCaulay, LitHub.com, 27 Feb. 2025
Did you know?
Impetus provides the âwhyâ for something: it can be understood as a driving force (as when winning a competition is the impetus for training), an incentive (as when increased skills serve as an impetus for taking a class), or encouragement (as when difficulties are the impetus for improvements). But its root packs more of a wallop: Latin impetus means âassaultâ as well as âimpetus,â and it comes from impetere meaning âto attack.â (Impetere itself comes from petere, meaning âto go to, seek.â) If these origins seem a tad aggressive for such a genteel-sounding word as impetus, consider phrases and idioms like light a fire under someone and push comes to shove, both used when a strong impetus is provided for someone to act, decide, or accomplish something.
