bromide
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
Merriam-Webster
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2025
⏱️ 2 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 8, 2025 is:
bromide • \BROH-myde\ • noun
A bromide is a statement intended to make someone feel happier or calmer, but too dull and unoriginal to be effective.
// Their speech had nothing more to offer than the usual bromides about how everyone needs to work together.
Examples:
“According to the old bromide, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. My grandfather, who had limited formal education but a wealth of common sense, countered that with, ‘Just water and fertilize your own grass. After all, it’s your grass and you are in charge of how it grows! Besides, that other stuff may be nothing but AstroTurf.’” — Rodger Dean Duncan, Forbes, 4 Sept. 2024
Did you know?
A bromide is a statement so worn and trite as to be ineffective when it’s offered to make someone feel better. Before the sigh-inducing type, though, bromides were most familiar in compounds like potassium bromide, used in the late 19th century as a sedative to treat everything from epilepsy to sleeplessness. (The chemical element bromine had been discovered in 1826.) Such compounds fell from use with the invention of barbiturates in the early 20th century, around the same time that the word bromide started to be applied to anything or anyone dull enough to make one drowsy.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's the Word of the Day for November 8th. |
| 0:11.8 | Today's word is bromide, spelled B-R-O-M-I-D-E. |
| 0:16.9 | Bromide is a noun. |
| 0:18.4 | A bromide is a statement intended to make someone feel happier or calmer, |
| 0:23.1 | but too dull and unoriginal to be effective. Here's the word used in a sentence from Forbes. |
| 0:30.6 | According to the old bromide, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. My grandfather, |
| 0:36.2 | who had limited formal education, but a |
| 0:39.0 | wealth of common sense, countered that with, just water and fertilize your own grass. After all, |
| 0:45.5 | it's your grass, and you are in charge of how it grows. Besides, that other stuff may be nothing |
| 0:51.1 | but astroturf. A bromide is a statement so worn and trite as to be |
| 0:56.2 | ineffective when it's offered to make someone feel better. Before the sigh-inducing type, though, |
| 1:02.1 | bromides were most familiar in compounds like potassium bromide, used in the late 1800s as a sedative |
| 1:09.9 | to treat everything from epilepsy to sleeplessness. |
| 1:13.5 | The chemical element, bromine, had been discovered in 1826. |
| 1:18.5 | Such compounds fell from use with the invention of barbiturates in the early 20th century, |
| 1:24.4 | around the same time that the word bromide started to be applied to anything or |
| 1:28.8 | anyone dull enough to make one drowsy. With your word definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups. |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Merriam-Webster, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Merriam-Webster and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.