r/VocabWordOfTheDay

In the 1530s truculent meant "fierce, savage, barbarous". That's Etymonline's gloss for the first English uses, from Latin truculentus, which covered everything from stern to cruel. Wiktionary still lists "cruel or savage" as sense 1, and it keeps an obsolete sense for a disease: destructive, deadly.

Cambridge has moved on. Its main definition is "unpleasant and likely to argue a lot", and the American entry has "having a bad state of mind, or behaving in a threatening manner". Nobody gets hurt in either one. Even the example on the card is only a look in somebody's eyes. That's why I'd put truculent at the mild end of the three: you can be truculent for a whole afternoon without anything happening.

Pugnacious has a fist in it. Latin pugnus is a fist, pugnare is to fight (Etymonline adds "especially with fists"), and pugnax meant combative, fond of fighting. I think the fondness is what separates it. Cambridge's definition ends with "expressing an argument or opinion very forcefully", and that's why a pugnacious columnist sounds half-admired to me in a way a truculent one doesn't.

Belligerent is the far end, because it started as an actual war. It's bellum, war, plus gerere, to carry on, and as a noun it still means a country or group that is fighting one (Etymonline dates that noun to 1811). Bellum also had an Old Latin form, duellum, and that older form is where duel comes from. The one-on-one sense came later, apparently from a fancied link with duo, two. So a belligerent drunk at a bar is, going by the Latin, waging war.

Where trux, the Latin word under truculent, comes from is still open. Watkins tentatively connects it to a root meaning to cross over or overcome. De Vaan points instead to Middle Welsh drwg and Middle Irish droch-, both meaning bad. I'm hoping de Vaan is right, mostly because "bad" is a funnier ancestor than "overcome".

I've been truculent before my first coffee more times than I'd like to admit. Pugnacious I'd have to earn.

The card defines precarious as "in a dangerous state, not secure", which is accurate but leaves out where the insecurity comes from. That part turns out to be the whole story of the word.

It shares a root with pray.

The chain runs through Latin. The PIE root *prek- meant to ask or entreat. That gave Latin prex, meaning entreaty or prayer, and the verb precari, to pray. From precari came the adjective precarius: obtained by asking, held by someone's favour rather than by right. English borrowed it in the 1640s as a legal term meaning held through the favour of another. The sense we use now, risky or uncertain, came later.

The legal sense was concrete rather than metaphorical. A precarium was a real form of tenure: land granted to a petitioner on request, for no fixed term, revocable whenever the grantor felt like revoking it. You were not a tenant with rights. You were someone whose request had been granted and could be ungranted.

The modern meaning follows from that without much of a leap. If your hold on something rests entirely on another party's continuing goodwill, your position is unsafe however comfortable it looks today. By the 1680s the word had generalised to risky and uncertain, and not everyone was pleased about it. Addison was still reminding readers of the original sense in 1711.

Then it looped back. Precariat, which grew out of Bourdieu's work and was popularised by Guy Standing in 2011, is precarious welded to proletariat, and it names workers with no security of employment. Standing makes the etymological point himself: the defining experience is having to ask, to plead with people who hold authority, to depend on favour instead of right. A term coined for modern labour landed back on the Roman land grant.

What it is not: unstable, perilous, tenuous. Unstable describes something whose own properties make it liable to shift. Perilous describes danger to whoever is near it. Tenuous describes something thin, usually a link or an argument. Precarious is specifically about a hold that could be let go.

The test I use, for whatever it is worth: if you can name who or what is doing the holding, precarious fits. If nothing is holding it and the thing is simply unsound, you probably want unstable. A precarious majority has someone who could walk. An unstable one just falls over.

Covet came into English in the mid-1200s already meaning the bad kind of wanting. Etymonline's earliest sense is to desire something "inordinately or without regard for the rights of others," from Old French coveitier and probably, further back, Latin cupiditas, and the respectable sense, wanting eagerly to have something, only turns up about a century later. Lust went the other way. In Old English it covered desire, appetite and plain pleasure, and the sense of sinful desire grew out of Bible translations, where "lusts of the flesh" rendered the Latin concupiscentia carnis. Its relatives in the other Germanic languages tend to mean simply pleasure, so wanderlust, borrowed from German in 1902, brought something like the older word back into English. Crave drifted too, more quietly. Old English crafian meant to ask for or demand something by right, and it reached the longing sense around 1400, probably by way of asking very earnestly. Yearn and esurient have stayed closer to home: one goes back to an Old English verb for being eager, a cousin of German gern, gladly, and the other was borrowed in the 1670s from the Latin for being hungry, esurire, which is built on edere, to eat. Megrim is the odd one. It's a worn-down form of migraine, which came through French and Late Latin from Greek hēmikrania, half the skull, and along the way it also picked up the senses low spirits and a whim or fancy. Etymonline says the word now seems obsolete or archaic even in those senses, which is a pity, because I can't think of a better name for wanting something badly at four in the afternoon and not at all by dinner.

Sanguine gets used as a dressier "optimistic", and it almost works, but the word comes with a condition attached. You are sanguine about something that could reasonably go badly. Sanguine about the layoffs, about the diagnosis, about their chances in the second half: all fine. "I'm sanguine about the weather on Saturday" is off, and off in a way people can hear even when they can't say why. Nothing is at stake, so there is nothing to be composed about.

That is what the one-word gloss loses. Optimistic points forward at a good outcome. Sanguine points at a threat and declines to panic. Hopeful and upbeat are cheerful; sanguine is unbothered. The first time I saw it used about someone's stock portfolio I assumed it was a mistake, and it wasn't, because money is exactly the kind of thing you can lose.

Two traps worth knowing. The register is formal and written, so out loud it can come off slightly pleased with itself, and "not worried" usually does the same work. And the close relatives went somewhere else entirely: sanguinary means bloodthirsty, sanguineous means relating to blood, all three off the same Latin sanguis. "A sanguinary outlook" is not a more impressive way to say a hopeful one.

Ebullient. Cheerful and full of energy, bubbling over with.

The word itself comes from a Latin verb meaning to boil over. Fitting.

Have you heard of this word before?

How have you used it?

👇

Harmless, contagious, deliberate, or obvious.
One of these actually fits.

Drop your answer below. Reveal tonight.

Comment your answer before you scroll on.

Same idea, one word instead of three, and it sounds like you meant to say it that way.

Save this one for later.

Keep in mind!

That while these mean the same thing on paper, how you use them depends heavily on context.

"Impossible to satisfy" works broadly for standard expectations, moods, or general standards. On the other hand, describing a person directly as "insatiable" often implies a physical or biological craving. To use "insatiable" broadly without that implication, it usually needs to be paired with a specific noun (like an insatiable curiosity or insatiable demand).

Same lecture, same suffering. One word captures the feeling perfectly.

Interminable means lasting for a very long time, or seeming to continue without end. It often carries an additional implication that the duration is tedious, tiresome or frustrating.

Have you heard of it before?

This the whole idea behind expanding your vocabulary.

Not bigger words for their own sake. Words you would actually reach for.

Comment your own before and after with a word you’ve learned recently.

Pique. A flash of irritation or resentment when your pride has been slighted.

It usually shows up as “in a fit of pique,” which might be the most dramatic possible way to describe being a little offended.

Comment the smallest thing that has ever piqued you.

Rash was a northern word in the late 1300s for nimble, quick or vigorous, related to German rasch, "fast", and the reckless sense doesn't show up until around 1500. Audacious went the other way. Latin audax could mean brave, but Etymonline says it was more often used in a bad sense, rash or foolhardy, and English borrowed audacious in the 1540s as "confident, intrepid, daring" before picking up "shameless" in the 1590s. Behind audax is audere, to dare, which de Vaan traces to avidus, greedy, and I find that oddly fitting for the kind of nerve audacious describes. The other four have stayed compliments, as far as I can tell. Valiant comes through Old French vaillant from valoir, to be worth something, and before that Latin valere, to be strong. Stout meant "valiant, brave" around 1300 and isn't recorded meaning fat until 1804, which is why stouthearted still sounds like praise. I'd still take audacious over valiant, though. Valiant sounds like a medal, and audacious sounds like something you actually did.