GM ☀️ Your word of the day is! 🔤 Frowsy [FROW-zee] 📖 What It Means: Something described as frowsy has a messy or dirty appearance. 📰 Example: The lamp, discovered in a neglected corner of a frowsy antique store, turned out to be quite valuable. 💬 In Context: “Footage from his early shows is sublime. In one, models with frowsy hair totter along the catwalk in clogs, clutching—for reasons not explained—dead mackerel.” — Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian (London), 4 Mar. 2024 💡 Did You Know? Despite its meanings suggesting neglect and inattention, frowsy has been kept in steady rotation by English users since the late 1600s. The word (which is also spelled frowzy and has enjoyed other variants over the centuries) first wafted into the language in an olfactory sense describing that which smells fusty and musty—an old factory, perhaps, or “corrupt air from animal substance,” which Benjamin Franklin described as “frouzy” in a 1773 letter. Frowsy later gained an additional sense describing the appearance of something (or someone) disheveled or unkempt. Charles Dickens was a big fan of this usage, writing of “frowzy fields, and cowhouses” in Dombey and Son and “a frowzy fringe” of hair hanging about someone’s ears in The Old Curiosity Shop. Both senses are still in use today. 🔗
Word of the Day: Hibernaculum
If you’re afraid of snakes or bats, you probably won’t enjoy thinking about hibernacula, where hundreds, even thousands, of these creatures mig...
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GM ☀️ Your word of the day is! 🔤 Alchemy [AL-kuh-mee] 📖 What It Means: refers to a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. 💬 Example: “Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System hit North American shores, singlehandedly resurrecting the video-game market after its infamous post-Atari crash in 1983. To do so, it needed a heavy hitter, a killer must-have title that could put butts in seats and lock audiences into the tube TV until their eyes bleed. That game was Super Mario Bros.—a product so potent, its exact alchemy has never been re-created.” — Christopher Cruz, Rolling Stone, 18 Oct. 2025 💡 Did You Know? Alchemy—the medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy that focused on the attempt to change less valuable metals into gold, to find a universal cure for disease, and to discover a means of prolonging life indefinitely—was practiced in much of the ancient world, from China and India to Greece. Alchemy as practiced in ancient Egypt was later revived in 12th-century Europe through translations of Arabic texts into Latin, which led to the development of pharmacology and to the rise of modern chemistry. The word alchemy was first used in English in the 1400s, and by the mid-1500s it had developed figurative senses relating to powers and processes that can change or transform things in mysterious or impressive ways. 🔗
Word of the Day: Hibernaculum
If you’re afraid of snakes or bats, you probably won’t enjoy thinking about hibernacula, where hundreds, even thousands, of these creatures mig...
 #WordOfTheDay #Nostr #Dictionary #Learning