William Beecher, military correspondent for the New York Times, publishes a front page dispatch from Washington, “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested,” which accurately described the first of the secret B-52 bombing raids in Cambodia. Within hours, Henry Kissinger, presidential assistant for national security affairs, contacted J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, asking him […]

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 9, 2025 is:

gloss • \GLAHSS\  • verb

To gloss a word or phrase is to provide its meaning, or in other words, to explain or define it.

// Many unfamiliar terms are glossed in the book’s introduction.

See the entry >

Examples:

“It is revealing that early dictionaries regularly defined equality as ‘conformity,’ or glossed the word, like Noah Webster did in 1806, as ‘likeness, evenness, uniformity.’” — Darrin M. McMahon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Apr. 2024

Did you know?

If you’re the type of word nerd who finds poring over book glossaries to be the bee’s knees, we know you’ll get a buzz from this gloss of the verb gloss. To gloss something, such as a word or phrase, is to explain or define it. The noun gloss, it follows, refers to (among other things) a brief explanation of a word or expression. And a glossary of course is a collection of textual glosses, or of specialized terms, with their meanings. Both forms of gloss, as well as the word glossary, trace back to the Greek noun glôssa, meaning “tongue,” “language,” or “obscure word requiring explanation.” Another descendent of glôssa, the English noun glossa, refers not to a bee’s knees but to a bee’s tongue, or to the tongue of another insect.

By Christian J. Collier