Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 21, 2026 is: orthography • \or-THAH-gruh-fee\  • noun Orthography refers to the way in which the words of a language are spelled, or to the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage. // As the winner of several spelling bees, she impressed her teachers with her exceptional grasp of orthography. See the entry > Examples: “Ormin, a medieval monk, sought to bring order to English orthography by addinng morre letterrs to worrds. August Thibaudin, a London professor, tried 9dding n3mbers. Our ideas for simplifying spelling have ranged from the rashonal to the redikulus to the döunnryt ubsërrd, and with each whimsical solution we seem to get further away from cognitive stability.” — Gabe Henry, Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, 2025 Did you know? The concept of orthography (a term that comes from the Greek words orthos, meaning “right or true,” and graphein, meaning “to write”) was not something that really concerned English speakers until the introduction of the printing press in England during the 15th century. From that point on, English spelling became progressively more uniform. Our orthography has been relatively stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such as the change of musick to music. Incidentally, many of these reforms were championed by Merriam-Webster’s own Noah Webster.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 20, 2026 is: indoctrinate • \in-DAHK-truh-nayt\  • verb To indoctrinate someone is to teach them to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group while categorically rejecting other ideas, opinions, and beliefs. // The video series attempts to indoctrinate younger audiences with ahistorical and unscientific ideas. See the entry > Examples: "They worry about being 'cut off' from poetry, particularly by the jobs that they need to sustain their daily lives and that they fear may quietly indoctrinate them into a contrary value system." — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 2 Feb. 2026 Did you know? Indoctrinate means "brainwash" in most contexts today, but its meaning wasn't always so negative. When the verb first appeared in English in the 17th century, it simply meant "to teach"—a meaning linked closely to its source, the Latin verb docēre, which also means "to teach." (Other offspring of docēre include docile, doctor, document, and, of course, doctrine). By the 19th century, indoctrinate was being used in the sense of teaching someone to fully accept only the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 19, 2026 is: nugatory • \NOO-guh-tor-ee\  • adjective Something described as nugatory is of little or no consequence. In law, nugatory describes something (such as a statute or agreement) without operative legal effect. // Most of the criticism of the film in the weeks since its release has been nugatory nonsense. // This new contract renders the previous agreement nugatory. See the entry > Examples: “Public outrage, fanned by the press, did not engage with the work but focused instead on taxpayers’ money having been squandered on a worthless ‘pile of bricks.’ In fact, the purchase price of [pounds sterling] 2,297 was nugatory, but the issue was never really about price but about rejecting the new and the challenging in art.” — Art Monthly, 1 Dec. 2025 Did you know? Just because nugatory isn’t the most common word in the English language doesn’t mean it’s trifling. Rather, nugatory is literally trifling because the two words are synonymous, as in “comments too nugatory to merit attention.” Nugatory first appeared in English in the 17th century; it comes from the Latin adjective nugatorius, which can mean not only “trifling” or “frivolous” but also “futile.” This sense carried over into English as well, and so in some contexts nugatory means “ineffective” or “having no force,” as when Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson invoked “the nugatory value of the contemporary penny.” Nugatory may mean little to some, but we think it’s worth a pretty penny.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 18, 2026 is: hiatus • \hye-AY-tus\  • noun In general contexts, hiatus usually refers to a period of time when something, such as an activity or program, is suspended. In biology, hiatus describes a gap or passage in an anatomical part or organ, and in linguistics, it refers to the occurrence of two vowel sounds without pause or intervening consonantal sound. // The actor, who’s been on hiatus for several years, will be starring in a new film. See the entry > Examples: “Following its return in 2025 after a nearly three-year hiatus, the 52nd American Music Awards are heading back to Las Vegas to be broadcast live from a new venue, the MGM Grand Garden Arena.” — Steven J. Horowitz, Variety, 10 Mar. 2026 Did you know? This brief hiatus in your day is brought to you by, well, hiatus. While the word now most often refers to a temporary pause, hiatus originally referred to a physical opening in something, such as the mouth of a cave, or, as the 18th century British novelist Laurence Sterne would have it, a sartorial gap: in the wildly experimental novel Tristram Shandy, Sterne wrote of “the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches.” Hiatus comes from the Latin verb hiare, meaning “to yawn,” which makes it a distant relation of both yawn and chasm. And that’s all we have for now—you may resume your regular activities.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 17, 2026 is: postulate • \PAHSS-chuh-layt\  • verb Postulate is a formal word used to mean “to suggest something, such as an idea or theory, especially in order to start or continue a discussion.” // Scientists have postulated the existence of water on the planet’s largest moon. See the entry > Examples: “Based on their findings, researchers postulate that Homo sapiens reacted better to lead exposure evolutionarily than Neanderthals, a species that were close relatives to Homo sapiens and that went extinct around 40,000 years ago.” — Mason Leath, ABC News, 16 Oct. 2025 Did you know? When you postulate an idea or theory you suggest that it is true especially for the purposes of an argument or discussion. The word postulate is mostly at home in formal and academic contexts, but don’t let that stop you from postulating, for example, that takeout for dinner makes sense given the cook’s delayed return home from work, or that a thunderstorm is imminent given the cumulonimbus building on the horizon. This “hypothesize” sense of postulate emerged in the early 18th century, but the verb first appeared in English centuries earlier in ecclesiastical contexts, as recorded in our Unabridged dictionary. To postulate someone, according to this sense of the word, was to request that a higher authority in the church sanction their promotion even though they would otherwise be disqualified by church rules or regulations.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 16, 2026 is: brazen • \BRAY-zun\  • adjective Brazen describes someone who is acting, or something that is done, in a very open and shocking way without shame or embarrassment. // The opposition party’s campaign has not been shy in assailing the brazen corruption of the incumbent for funneling public funds into private coffers. See the entry > Examples: “There are no coyotes on Block Island. However, they have a presence in all of Rhode Island’s other communities. ... This all makes sense, because Rhode Island, for the most part, is a heavily wooded area. Furthermore, rabbits, berries, mice and voles are in plentiful supply; add to this a burgeoning population, eventually food may become an issue. This is where the clever coyote is perhaps becoming more brazen and bold while hunting for food in certain neighborhoods.” — J. V. Houlihan, The Block Island (Rhode Island) Times, 30 Jan. 2026 Did you know? The oldest meaning of brazen, which traces back to the Old English word for “brass,” bræs, is a literal one: “made of brass” (you might on occasion encounter “brazen cups” or “brazen doors” in something you’re reading). Over the centuries, brazen picked up a number of figurative senses stemming from the physical properties of brass, from its strength to its sound to its color, as when poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of “The glory that the wood receives, / At sunset, in its brazen leaves.” But it’s the hardness of brass that led eventually to the now common “shameless” meaning of brazen. Consider this passage written by the minister Thomas Doolittle in the late 1600s: “... though thinkest it no shame, or if thou dost, thou has a face of brass ... and blushest not ...” A face of brass, or a “brazen face” (a phrase recorded in writing as early as the late 1500s) is one that is more or less immobile, betraying no sign of shame of wrongdoing. Today, brazen is used not just for people who are openly shameless or disrespectful, but for openly shameless or disrespectful behavior, as in “a brazen disregard for the rules.”

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 15, 2026 is: mayhem • \MAY-hem\  • noun Mayhem refers to needless or willful damage or violence, and especially to a scene or situation that involves a lot of violence. In figurative use, it may refer to any instance of excited activity. // The director's newest thriller is brimming with murder and mayhem. See the entry > Examples: "The storage space is a veritable Fort Knox safe from tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and all manner of mischief and mayhem, where the 68-degree temperature and 45% humidity are ideal for preserving paper and film." — Lisa Gutierrez, The Kansas City Star, 3 Mar. 2026 Did you know? Legally speaking, mayhem refers to the gruesome crime of deliberately causing an injury that permanently disfigures another. The word comes via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb maheimer ("to maim") and is probably of Germanic origin; the English verb maim comes from the same ancestor. The "disfigurement" sense of mayhem first appeared in English in the 15th century. Centuries later, the word came to refer to any kind of violent behavior. Nowadays, mayhem is frequently used to suggest any kind of chaos or disorder, even in far less fraught circumstances, as in "there was mayhem on the field after the winning goal was scored."

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 14, 2026 is: enjoin • \in-JOIN\  • verb Enjoining is about requiring or prohibiting. To enjoin a person is to direct or order them to do something. To enjoin an act or practice is to prohibit it; in legal contexts, that prohibition is by way of a judicial order. // Our guide enjoined us to take great care as we began our journey. // The court has enjoined the ban. // We were enjoined from speaking on the tour. See the entry > Examples: “Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit Thursday ... to put a landlord accused of providing unsuitable living conditions to his renters out of business. ... The lawsuit seeks restitution for impacted tenants and to ‘enjoin the defendants from doing business in the District.’” — Gary Fields, The Associated Press, 13 Feb. 2026 Did you know? Enjoin has the Latin verb jungere, meaning “to join,” at its root, but the kind of joining expressed by enjoin is quite particular: it is about linking someone to an action or activity by either requiring or prohibiting it. When it’s the former at hand—that is, when enjoin is used to mean “to direct or order someone to do something”—the preposition to is typically employed, as in “they enjoined us to secrecy.” When prohibition is involved, from is common, as in “attendees were enjoined from photographing the event.” In legal contexts, enjoining involves prohibition by judicial order, through means of an injunction, as in “the judge enjoined the sale of the property.”

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 13, 2026 is: kibitzer • \KIB-it-ser\  • noun A kibitzer is someone who watches other people and makes unwanted comments about what they are doing. // It wasn't long after they bought their house that the couple heard from neighborhood kibitzers offering tips on landscaping and remodeling. See the entry > Examples: "During the chess games, the telegraph operators occasionally asked each other how many people were in the room. At times, a dozen kibitzers looked on. At others, only the rotating cast of chess players and telegraph operators was present." — Greg Uyeno, IEEE Spectrum, 11 Dec. 2025 Did you know? The Yiddish language has given English some particularly piquant terms over the years, and kibitzer (or kibbitzer) is one such word. Kibitzer came into English—by way of the Yiddish kibitser—from the German word kiebitzen, meaning "to look on (at a card game)." (Like its ancestor, kibitzer was originally, and sometimes still is, applied to vocal observers of cards as well as other games.) Although kibitzer usually implies the imparting of unwanted advice, there is a respectable body of evidence for a kibitzer as a person simply making comments or even just shooting the breeze.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 12, 2026 is: recondite • \REK-un-dyte\  • adjective Recondite is a formal word used to describe something that is difficult to understand or that is not known by many people. // The text addresses a technical subject using recondite vocabulary, which makes it very difficult to read. // The candy has the perfect balance of sweet and tart, but what delights me most are the recondite facts printed inside the wrapper. See the entry > Examples: “Each medical school has variations in its prerequisites, but all require a strong foundation in the sciences. This includes courses such as the notoriously recondite organic chemistry as well as biology, general chemistry, and physics.” — Richard Menger, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2025 Did you know? Recondite is one of those underused but useful words that’s always a boon to one’s vocabulary. Though it describes something difficult to understand, there is nothing recondite about the word’s history. It dates to the early 1600s, when it was coined from the Latin word reconditus, the past participle of recondere, “to conceal.” (“Concealed” is also a meaning of recondite, albeit an obscure one today.) Remove the re- of recondite and you get something even more obscure: condite, an obsolete verb meaning both “to pickle or preserve” and “to embalm.” Add the prefix in- to that quirky charmer and we get incondite, which means “badly put together,” as in “incondite prose.” All three words have the Latin word condere at their root; that verb is translated variously as “to put or bring together” and “to put up or store”—as in, perhaps, some pickles or preserves.