Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 13, 2026 is:





abscond • \ab-SKAHND\ • verb

To abscond is to leave, flee, or escape a place in secret and go into hiding. Often, someone is said to have absconded with something.

// It was mid-semester, when fantasies about absconding from school and leaving the stress of exams behind abound.

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Examples:

“So having a variety of financial intermediaries is good. But they need to be regulated and supervised by objective parties using objective standards. If not, someone could open a bank, take deposits and abscond to a tropical isle.” — Edward Lotterman, The St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press, 23 Nov. 2025





Did you know?

In “Take the Money and Run,” a 1976 song by the Steve Miller Band, the singer punctuates a song about teenage bandits with the catchy refrain “Go on, take the money and run.” Granted, the song probably wouldn’t have charted had it been titled “Abscond,” but the meaning would have been the same. Abscond is a word most often used in formal contexts for when someone is running and hiding from the law, often with cash or other ill-gotten gains. In legal circles it’s used specifically when someone flies like an eagle from a jurisdiction to evade the legal process, as in “absconded from parole.” The history of abscond doesn’t evade scrutiny: it comes from the Latin verb abscondere, meaning “to hide away.” (That word’s root is condere, meaning “to conceal.”) Today, whether some joker absconds by going to the country to bury some treasure or by taking a jet airliner beyond the law’s reach, they are, in essence, hiding themselves away.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 12, 2026 is:





nexus • \NEK-sus\ • noun

A nexus is a relationship or connection between people or things. Nexus can also refer to a connected group or series or to the center or focus of something.

// The cultural district serves as a nexus for art and cuisine.

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Examples:

“The eclectic costume design by Ryan Matthieu Smith suggests Eastern Europe at the nexus of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: loosely fitting frocks and vests, layered and embroidered, and hats in myriad geometric shapes ...” — Manuel Mendoza, The Dallas Morning News, 1 Mar. 2026





Did you know?

If you’re unfamiliar with the word nexus, the popular, long-running video game series The Legend of Zelda provides an object lesson in its several definitions. When nexus came into English from Latin in the 17th century, it meant “connection” or “link.” Eventually, people began using it to refer to a connected group or series of things, as in “a nexus of relationships.” In recent decades it has taken on a third meaning, “center” or “hub,” perhaps from the notion that a point in the center of an arrangement serves to join together the objects that surround it. Now, one might plausibly say that the 20 Zelda games (not counting remakes and spin-offs) themselves form a nexus, as each represents an installment in a long, twisty saga with numerous echoes and callbacks to other games in the series. Most of these feature the fictional land of Hyrule, which often presents magical nexuses to shadowy alternate dimensions (1991’s A Link to the Past), the past (2011’s Skyward Sword), or the underworld (2023’s Tears of the Kingdom) that the hero, Link (ahem) must traverse. As for nexus’s third meaning, Hyrule’s map is nearly always situated around a central nexus, or hub, in the form of the castle where the titular Zelda lives. (If you’re into gaming or curious about its lingo, don’t miss the article “Popular Gaming Terms Explained”).

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 11, 2026 is:





galore • \guh-LOR\ • adjective

Galore is an informal adjective that describes something as being in large numbers or amounts. It is always used postpositively, that is, after a noun.

// The store promises bargains galore on Black Friday.

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Examples:

“The rest of the home is filled with what Josh calls ‘love stuff,’ like an entire wall of family pictures, his mother’s recipe box, random heirlooms, and artwork galore, including his grandfather’s acid etching prints and three-dimensional pieces made by his mother … who worked in wood and papier-mâché.” — Meg McConahey, The Mercury News (San Jose, California), 1 July 2026





Did you know?

Galore means “in large numbers or amounts,” making it a synonym of useful words like abundant and plentiful. But its charm lies not in its meaning but in its sound and syntax. Galore doesn’t sound like familiar Germanic or Latinate words, and for good reason—it’s one of a small number of Irish borrowings, coming from go leor, meaning “enough.” It also takes an odd position in phrases: it’s used postpositively, which means that it follows the word or words it modifies. First defined in one our dictionaries way back in 1864, the word was for many years obscure and a bit of a conundrum. Limited evidence of the word in use, along with its unusual syntax, led to some editorial back-and-forth about whether galore was an adjective or adverb; one can see how in a phrase like “someone who has money galore” galore might have been interpreted as modifying the verb have rather than the noun money. But by the seventh edition of our Collegiate dictionary, published in 1963, enough evidence had accumulated to confidently declare galore an adjective. If you’re curious about the Great Galore Grammar Debate, this article has information galore.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 10, 2026 is:





Luddite • \LUH-dyte\ • noun

Luddite refers to someone who is opposed to change, and especially to technological change.

// My friends call me a Luddite for refusing to use chat bots.

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Examples:

“Today, a Luddite is your grandparent who keeps looking at the screen rather than the camera when on Zoom, the Boomer who types in all-capital letters, the grouchy man who refuses to get a smart phone, the professor spewing invective against Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. … But the Luddites weren’t simple-minded primitives who objected to technology out of ignorance; they were dedicated craftsmen in the looming guilds who despised the shoddy craftsmanship of the mechanized contraptions replacing them, and of those same machines robbing them of their livelihoods.” — Ed Simon, Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling, 2026





Did you know?

Long before your Luddite friend was waxing poetic about how blissful it is to not have a smartphone, Luddites were protesting the textile machinery that was gradually replacing them. It was toward the end of 1811, in the vicinity of Nottingham, England, when handicraftsmen formed organized bands and began to riot for the destruction of the new machinery. Their name is of uncertain origin, but it may be connected to a (probably mythical) person named Ned Ludd. According to an unsubstantiated account in George Pellew's Life of Lord Sidmouth (1847), Ned Ludd was a Leicestershire villager of the late 1700s who, in a fit of rage, rushed into a stocking weaver's house and destroyed his equipment; subsequently, Ludd's name was proverbially connected with machinery destruction. With the onset of the information age, Luddite gained a broader sense describing anyone who shuns new technology.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 9, 2026 is:





inscrutable • \in-SKROO-tuh-bul\ • adjective

Inscrutable means "not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood." It often describes things that are mysterious or difficult to comprehend.

// His professor wore an inscrutable expression throughout the oral exam.

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Examples:

"The paper makes significant progress on an unresolved aspect of the inscrutable math equation that determines how the primes are distributed along the number line." — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 12 Aug. 2026





Did you know?

Scrutinizing the inscrutable may be futile: even close scrutiny can fail to decipher it. Scrutinizing the scrutable, on the other hand, is likely to yield some understanding. All of these scrut- words have the same Latin root: scrutari, meaning "to search or examine." While scrutiny, scrutinize, and inscrutable all prove themselves useful in everyday discourse, English speakers don’t tend to call much on scrutable, which functions as a synonym of comprehensible.