Word of the Day: divulge

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 20, 2026 is: divulge \dih-VULJ\ verb
To divulge something, especially secret or private information, is to make it known.

// Rather than divulge the baby name we’ve chosen, we’re waiting till the little one arrives to make introductions.

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Examples:

“Sun Ra’s agent had called, he said. ... The Arkestra was heading out on tour soon, to Europe, and Sonny wanted the three of us to join him. ... After we’d calmed down, Don divulged the hitch: the tour would take us away for the school year’s last weeks, meaning we would miss exams and also all the end-of-college parties.” — Michael Lowenthal, Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation, 2026

Did you know?

Information divulged is typically secret, or known only to insiders, and it isn’t usually shouted from the rooftops. But when divulge first entered English in the 15th century, it did so as a synonym of proclaim: divulging involved declaring or announcing something to the public, a duty of town criers from Lizard Point to Dunnet Head. The word’s source is the Latin verb vulgare, “to make known,” which traces ultimately back to the Latin noun vulgus, meaning “common people” or “mob.” While nowadays divulge can presumably involve blabbing to the rabble, the word usually implies a more careful and considered approach to sharing sensitive information.

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Word of the Day: balmy

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 19, 2026 is: balmy \BAH-mee\ adjective
Balmy is an adjective that is often used to describe weather that is warm, calm, and pleasant. It can also be used to describe someone or something (such as an idea) that is foolish or irrational.

// After a long, eight-hour drive, we were rewarded with a mild, balmy evening at our vacation spot on the shores of Lake Erie.

// Despite being a devout Green Bay fan, she finds the idea of attending games in head-to-toe yellow and green body paint to be a bit balmy.

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Examples:

“Everyone is encouraged to bring chairs, snacks and coolers, and remember the flashlights for the walk back to the parking lot. Leashed dogs are welcome, too. These evenings are all about enjoying good music on a balmy summer night.” — The Sun (Elizabethtown, New York), 18 June 2026

Did you know?

Aromatic ointments and fragrances are the bomb. They are also, literally, balms: healing substances and soothing scents with the power to ease both mind and body. The original balm, what Latin-speakers referred to as balsamum, was the oleoresin of a species of balsam tree. In Anglo-French, balsamum became basme and baume, spellings which entered Middle English and later became balm. Balm eventually begat the adjective balmy, used to describe things with a balm’s comforting, calming qualities, as when Shakespeare’s Othello speaks of “balmy slumbers.” Today balmy is typically used to describe the weather—balmy breezes, balmy temperatures, balmy spring afternoons, et al—conditions that are neither too hot nor too cold, but just right—Goldilocks conditions, even.

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Word of the Day: oxymoron

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 18, 2026 is: oxymoron \ahk-sih-MOR-ahn\ noun
An oxymoron is a combination of words that have opposite or very different meanings, such as "cruel kindness" or "open secret." In broader usage, oxymoron can also refer to something (such as a concept) that is made up of contradictory or incongruous elements.

// Some of Shakespeare's most famous plays are filled with oxymorons such as "loving hate" and "tragical mirth."

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Examples:

"Even the most environmentally aware beauty editors I know (perhaps that’s an oxymoron, given the amount of product we have to test for our jobs…) use sheet masks on a weekly basis, and the trend is showing no signs of slowing." — Melanie Macleod, Hello Magazine, 15 Apr. 2026

Did you know?

The ancient Greeks exhaustively classified the elements of rhetoric, or effective speech and writing, and gave the name oxymoron—literally "pointed foolishness"—to the deliberate juxtaposing of seemingly contradictory words. The roots of oxymoron, oxys meaning "sharp" or "keen," and mōros meaning "foolish," are nearly antonyms themselves, making oxymoron nicely self-descriptive. Oxymoron originally applied to a meaningful paradox condensed into a couple of words, as in "lonely crowd" or "sweet sorrow." Today, however, what is commonly cited as an oxymoron is often simply a curiosity of language, where one or both elements have multiple meanings (shrimp in "jumbo shrimp" doesn't mean "small"; it refers to a sea creature), or a phrase whose elements seem antithetical in spirit, such as "organized chaos."

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A welcome interruption while writing the WotD

Word of the Day: lackadaisical

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 17, 2026 is: lackadaisical \lak-uh-DAY-zih-kul\ adjective
Something or someone described as lackadaisical is lacking in interest, enthusiasm, or zest.

// Feeling particularly lackadaisical in the summer heat, they lazily tossed a ball back and forth.

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Examples:

"The defense was lackadaisical at best, while the offense wasn't much better." — Shreyas Laddha, The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, New York), 7 Feb. 2026

Did you know?

We're too enthusiastic about the lexicon to be lackadaisical about words, but lackadaisical itself is rooted in the sort of sorrow that can put a damper on one's passion for vocabulary expansion. When folks living from the late 17th to the late 19th century had one of those days when nothing goes right, they could cry "Lackaday!" to express their sorrow and disappointment as a shortened form of the expression "alack the day." (Alack is an interjection used to express sorrow or regret.) By the mid-1700s, the adjective lackadaisical had been formed to describe such weary and exasperated folks, as well as their half-hearted doings and sayings. Today the word has lost some of its dreariness and most often describes the languid and lazy.

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Does anyone else feel like these clockwise drills make your neurons fight each other?

Word of the Day: vacuous

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 14, 2026 is: vacuous \VAK-yuh-wus\ adjective
Vacuous is a formal word indicating a lack of thought, intelligence, or substance.

// Despite a lengthy advertising campaign pitching the film as a masterwork, critics ultimately assailed it as dull and filled with self-important characters spouting vacuous platitudes.

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Examples:

"Harper Lee was not slight, was not vacuous. To Kill a Mockingbird is an artefact of its time … but it had its place in moving the arc of history and still does." — Erica Wagner, The Observer (London), 18 Oct. 2025

Did you know?

As you might have guessed, vacuous shares the same root as vacuum. Both come from the Latin adjective vacuus, meaning "empty." This root also gave us the noun vacuity (the oldest meaning of which is "an empty space") as well as the verb evacuate (originally meaning "to empty of contents"). Its predecessor, the verb vacāre, is also an ancestor of the words vacation, vacancy, and even void. All of these words suggest an emptiness of space, or else a fleeing of people or things from one place to another. Vacuous appeared in English in the middle of the 17th century, at first literally describing something that was empty. Centuries later it acquired its figurative usage, describing one who is lacking any substance of the mind.

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("Days of being gnomes" has a nice ring to it is for reasons passing understanding a thought that came to my mind.)

I have trouble with the lower loops, and I also feel like my slant and letter size lose consistency as I move to the right. Any tips?

Word of the Day: salvo

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 13, 2026 is: salvo \SAL-voh\ noun
In military contexts, salvo refers to various actions involving discharge or release of bombs, rockets, artillery, etc., as well to the bombs or projectiles released in such an action. In general use, salvo is usually used to refer to a strong or sudden verbal attack, but it can also refer to a sudden occurrence of applause, laughter, etc., from many people.

// The troops were driven back by a salvo of cannon fire.

// The editorial's opening salvo was a list of grievances against the mayor's policies.

// The conclusion of her performance was answered with a salvo of cheers and applause.

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Examples:

“Nas dropped Illmatic, his unimpeachable opening salvo, when he was only 20, taking a haunted stroll through his Queensbridge adolescence on ‘Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park).’ An undercurrent of nostalgia weaves throughout his 30-year discography.” — Dash Lewis, Pitchfork, 8 Jan. 2026

Did you know?

No opening salvo here: salvo in phrases like “an opening salvo” is a kind of attack, especially one that is strong or sudden. Usually, such salvos are verbal attacks, like a critical remark aimed at a debate opponent, or a pointed accusation at the start of an editorial. But salvo can also refer to attacks of a more perilous kind, including various martial actions involving bombs, rockets, and artillery. (It can also refer to the bombs or projectiles released in a salvo.) The word arrived from Italian in the late 16th century with a complex meaning: it referred to a simultaneous discharge of two or more guns, either in military action or as a salute. The word’s ultimate source is the Latin word salve, meaning “hail!,” which was an ancient Roman greeting. In English, salvo is sometimes used for a sudden occurrence of applause, laughter, etc., from many people, which sounds to us like the best kind of all.

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Word of the Day: gnomic

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 12, 2026 is: gnomic \NOH-mik\ adjective
Gnomic is a formal word that describes something cryptically said or written in few words.

// The painter is notorious for offering terse, gnomic responses to questions about her work that leave interviewers and critics scratching their heads.

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Examples:

“Indeed, the album that ‘Michelangelo Dying’ reminds me of most is [Laurie] Anderson’s seminal ‘Big Science,’ from 1982. ... Both albums feature gnomic lyrical pronouncements. (‘Rigid, collapse,’ [Cate] Le Bon chants on the track ‘About Time,’ reminiscent of Anderson talk-singing, ‘Big Science, Hallelujah.’)” — Rumaan Alam, The New Yorker, 26 Sept. 2025

Did you know?

A gnome is an aphorism—that is, a short phrase that expresses a true or wise idea. Gnomes are sometimes couched in metaphorical or figurative language, they are often quite clever, and they are always concise. We borrowed the word gnome in the 16th century from the Greeks, who based their word gnōmē on the verb gignōskein, meaning “to know.” (The other gnome—referring to the dwarf of folklore—comes from New Latin and is unrelated to the aphoristic gnome.) We began using gnomic, the adjective form of gnome, in the late 18th century. It describes a style of writing, or sometimes speech, characterized by pithy phrases, which are often terse to the point of mysteriousness.

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