Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

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leviathan
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 11, 2025 is: leviathan • \luh-VYE-uh-thun\ • noun Leviathan is a word with literary flair that can refer broadly to something very large and powerful, or more narrowly to a large sea animal, or a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy. // Towering leviathans of the forest, giant sequoias often reach heights of more than 200 feet. See the entry > Examples: “These are dim days for the leviathan merchants. The smart whaling families have diversified and will hang onto their wealth for years to come. ... The less smart, those convulsed by the strange desire to continue doing what had always been done, who consider it a divinely issued directive to rid the waves of great fish, now face a problem: the Atlantic whale that built their houses and ships has seemingly wised up ...” — Ethan Rutherford, North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther: A Novel, 2025 Did you know? Old Testament references to a huge sea monster, Leviathan (in Hebrew, Liwyāthān), are thought to have been inspired by an ancient myth in which the god Baal slays a multiheaded sea monster. Leviathan appears in the Book of Psalms as a sea serpent that is killed by God and then given as food to creatures in the wilderness, and it is mentioned in the Book of Job as well. After making a splash in English in the 1300s, the word Leviathan began to be used, capitalized and uncapitalized, for enormous sea creatures both imagined and real—including as a synonym of whale over 100 times in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, as in “ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan.” Today, leviathan can be used for anything large and powerful, from ships to corporations.
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grift
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 10, 2025 is: grift • \GRIFT\ • verb To grift is to use dishonest tricks to illegally take money or property. // The email scammer shamelessly grifted thousands of dollars from unwitting victims. See the entry > Examples: "When the families demanded he return the jewellery he had grifted from them he arranged meetings and then did not show." — Peter Spriggs, The Echo (South Essex, England), 31 Oct. 2025 Did you know? Someone who grifts is a thief, but of a particular sort: they illegally obtain money or property by means of cleverness or deceit, and do not usually resort to physical force or violence. A grifter might be a pickpocket, a crooked gambler, a scammer, or a con artist. The most plausible etymology we have for the murky term is that grift is an early 20th century alteration of graft, a slightly older word which refers to the acquisition of money or property in dishonest or questionable ways. Both grift and graft have noun and verb forms.
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paltry
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 9, 2025 is: paltry • \PAWL-tree\ • adjective Paltry is a formal word that can describe something that is very small or too small in amount, or something that has little meaning, importance, or worth. // They're offering a paltry salary for the position. // The professor announced they'd finally had enough of the students' paltry excuses for being late to class. See the entry > Examples: "When the witty and wry English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ in 1995, only 39% of Americans had access to a home computer. According to the Pew Research Center, the number who were connected to the internet was a paltry 14%." — Ed Simon, LitHub.com, 25 Nov. 2024 Did you know? Before paltry was an adjective, it was a noun meaning trash. That now-obsolete noun came from palt or pelt, a dialect term referring to a piece of coarse cloth, or more broadly, to trash. The adjective paltry, which dates to the mid-16th century, originally described things considered worthless, or of very low quality, but it's gained a number of meanings over the centuries, none of which are complimentary. A paltry house might be neglected and unfit for occupancy; a paltry trick is a trick that is low-down and dirty; a paltry excuse is a poor one; and a paltry sum is small and insufficient.
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bravado
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 8, 2025 is: bravado • \bruh-VAH-doh\ • noun Bravado refers to confident or brave talk or behavior that is intended to impress other people. // She tells the stories of her youthful exploits with enough bravado to invite suspicion that they're embellished a bit. // The crew of climbers scaled the mountain with youthful bravado. See the entry > Examples: "One problem that exists in the whitewater community overall is that people don't always understand the basic elements associated with water and their ignorance and bravado often lead to an incident where someone gets injured or killed." — Tracy Hines, The Durango (Colorado) Herald, 19 Oct. 2025 Did you know? Displays of bravado may be show-offish, daring, reckless, and inconsistent with good sense—take, for example, the spectacular feats of stuntpeople—but when successful, they are still likely to be met with shouts of "bravo!" Celebrities, political leaders, corporate giants, and schoolyard bullies, however, may show a different flavor of bravado: one that suggests an overbearing boldness that comes from arrogance or from being in a position of power. The word bravado originally comes from the Italian adjective bravo, meaning "wild" or "courageous," which English can also thank for the more common brave.
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enigmatic
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 7, 2025 is: enigmatic • \en-ig-MAT-ik\ • adjective Something or someone described as enigmatic is mysterious and difficult to understand. // The band’s lead singer has always been an enigmatic figure, refusing to use social media or even sit for interviews. See the entry > Examples: “For thirty years, Perlefter’s carpet hung peacefully on the wall in the museum, delighting visitors with its beauty, its unusual palette, enigmatic motifs and its echoes of four empires.” — Dorothy Armstrong, Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, 2025 Did you know? The noun enigma can refer to a puzzle, a riddle, a question mark. It’s no mystery then, that the adjective enigmatic describes what is hard to solve or figure out. An enigmatic person, for example, may be someone with a bit of je ne sais quoi. What’s behind a stranger’s enigmatic smile? Your guess is as good as ours. Does the vocabulary in the short story you’re reading render it a tad enigmatic? Better grab a dictionary! Both enigma and enigmatic come from the Greek verb ainissesthai, meaning “to speak in riddles.”
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