It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 12th.

Today's word is brackish, spelled B-R-A-C-K-I-S-H.

Brackish is an adjective.

It means somewhat salty, usually describing water or bodies of water,

such as rivers, lakes, and estuaries. The word can also mean not appealing to the taste or repulsive.

Here's the word used in a sentence from Wired. The blood testing organs don't measure water levels, but rather the

concentration of salt, whose healthy range lies at almost exactly the same concentration as that

of the brackish intertidal water in which vertebrates first evolved, which is about one-third as salty as seawater. When the word brackish

first appeared in English in the 1500s, it simply meant salty, as did its Dutch parent, BRAC. Then, as now,

brackish was used to describe water that was a mixture of saltwater and freshwater, such as one encounters when a river

meets the sea. Since that time, however, Brackish has developed the additional meanings of

unpalatable and repulsive, presumably because of the oozy, mucky, and sometimes stinky

or stinky-ish, if you prefer, not just salty qualities of

coastal estuaries and swamps. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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