Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

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.

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."

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.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 16, 2026 is:





zeugma • \ZOOG-muh\ • noun

Zeugma refers to wordplay in which a single word relates to other words in such a way that it means something different in each case, as in “building a boat and a reputation” and “open a book along with your mind.”

// A clever use of zeugma was demonstrated by Groucho Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup (1933): “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.”

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Examples:

“... in an evocative use of zeugma—my favorite literary device ... [Oyinkan] Braithwaite writes, ‘The old house and everyone in it was falling apart.’” — Hudson Warm, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2 Nov. 2025





Did you know?

“Zeugma, like the pun, is economical: it contracts two sentences into one . . .; it links unrelated terms—mental with moral, abstract with physical, high with low—and thus generates surprise,” wrote Walter Redfern in Puns (1984). Zeugma, which has been a part of the English language since the 15th century, comes from Greek, where it literally means “joining.” But even those who are unfamiliar with the word are likely well acquainted with the clever wordplay to which it refers—zeugma is a beloved device of lyricists, probably for the economy noted by Redfern. Notable examples come from Alanis Morissette (“You held your breath and the door for me”), Taylor Swift (“The wine is cold like the shoulder that I gave you”), and the Beatles (“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name”).

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 15, 2026 is:





circumscribe • \SER-kum-skrybe\ • verb

To circumscribe something is to limit its range or activity.

// The president’s decision-making power was carefully circumscribed by the company’s board.

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Examples:

“A mid-credits scene that shows Santos and Mel at a karaoke bar performing a duet ... might seem to be a throwaway. But it’s more like a glimmer of a happy ending. By blowing off steam together, Mel is forming an independent identity and Santos is finding a healthy outlet for her anger. This could be the first step, for both of them, towards escaping a life circumscribed by work …” — Judy Berman, Time, 16 Apr. 2026





Did you know?

To circumscribe something is to limit its range or activity, but there is no circumscribing the range of influence the Latin ancestors of circumscribe have had. Circumscribe comes via Middle English from the Latin verb circumscribere (which roughly translates as “to draw a circle around”), which in turn comes from circum-, meaning “circle,” and scribere, meaning “to write or draw.” Among the many descendants of circum- are circuit, circumference, circumnavigate, circumspect, circumstance, and circumvent. Scribere gave us such words as scribe and scribble, as well as ascribe, describe, and transcribe, among others.