It's the Word of the Day podcast for January 22nd.

Today's word is dishevelled, spelled D-I-S-H-E-V-E-L-E-D.

Disheveled is an adjective.

A disheveled person or thing is not neat or tidy.

Here's the word used. In a sentence from The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in

Hollywood by Matthew Specter. My mother is waking up. She dresses quickly. Her oblong,

Scott's Irish face may be too idiosyncratic for the screen anyway,

the hollow cheekbones and sharp eyes, the straw-blonde hair worn in a low slung and slightly

dishevelled beehive. These days, the adjective disheveled is used to describe almost anything

or anyone marked by disorder or disarray.

Rumpled clothes, for example, often contribute to a disheveled appearance, as in Colson Whitehead's novel

Crook Manifesto, when the comedian Roscoe Pope walks on stage, disheveled in wrinkled green

corduroy pants. Apartments, desks, bedsheets,

you name it, all can be disheveled when not at their neatest and tidiest. Hair, however,

is the most common noun to which disheveled is applied, along with hairdo terms like bun and beard.

A fact that makes etymological sense.

Dishevelled comes from the Middle English adjective, dishevelled, meaning bareheaded, or with disordered hair.

That word is a partial translation of the Anglo-French word de Chevalet, a combination of the prefix

de, meaning dis, and chevali, meaning hair. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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