On November 21, 1817, U.S. troops from Fort Scott attack the small Seminole Indian village of Fowltown, located in southern Georgia, killing about 20 men and igniting the First Seminole War. The conflict, which lasted less than a year, would not succeed in squashing Native resistance, but it would contribute to the Spanish relinquishing its […]

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 21, 2025 is:

bloviate • \BLOH-vee-ayt\  • verb

To bloviate is to speak or write in an arrogant tone and with more words than are necessary.

// The podcaster tends to bloviate endlessly on topics about which he is not particularly knowledgeable.

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Examples:

"While other characters bloviate about their lives, Barbara is a much more internal character, her quietness making her seem all the more an outsider in her hometown." — Kristy Puchko, Mashable.com, 13 June 2025

Did you know?

Warren G. Harding is often linked to the word bloviate, but to him the word wasn't insulting; it simply meant "to spend time idly." Harding used the word often in that "hanging around" sense, but during his tenure as the 29th U.S. President (1921-23), he became associated with the "verbose" sense of bloviate, as his speeches tended to be on the long-winded side. Although he is sometimes credited with having coined the word, it's more likely that Harding picked it up from local slang while hanging around with his boyhood buddies in Ohio in the late 1800s. The term likely comes from a combination of the word blow plus the suffix -ate.

By Christian J. Collier