The largest-ever one-day percentage decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average comes not in 1929 but on October 19, 1987. As a number of unrelated events conspired to tank global markets, the Dow dropped 508 points—22.6 percent—in a panic that foreshadowed larger systemic issues. Confidence on Wall Street had grown throughout the 1980s as the […]

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 19, 2025 is:

veritable • \VAIR-uh-tuh-bul\  • adjective

Veritable is a formal adjective that means “being in fact the thing named and not false, unreal, or imaginary.” It is often used to stress the aptness of a metaphorical description.

// The island is a veritable paradise.

// The sale attracted a veritable mob of people.

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Examples:

“The Roma are often described as an ethnic minority, but many Romani communities view ‘Roma’ as a broad racial identity, stretching all the way back to our Indian ancestry. Indeed, to look at the Roma as one ethnicity is to disregard the veritable mosaic of Romani subgroups. There’s a thread that holds us all together, which to me feels like a string of fairy lights scattered across the world. Each of these lights shines with its own unique beauty.” — Madeline Potter, The Roma: A Traveling History, 2025

Did you know?

Veritable, like its close relative verity (“truth”), came to English through Anglo-French from Latin, ultimately the adjective vērus, meaning “true,” which also gave English verify, aver, and verdict. Veritable is often used as a synonym of genuine or authentic (“a veritable masterpiece”), but it is also frequently used to stress the aptness of a metaphor, often with a humorous tone (“a veritable swarm of lawyers”). In the past, language commentators objected to the latter use, but today it doesn’t draw much criticism.

By Christian J. Collier