It's the Word of the Day for November 11th.

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Today's word is Doughty, spelled D-O-U-G-H-T-Y.

Doughty is an adjective.

It's a word with an old-fashioned flair used to describe someone who is brave, strong, and determined.

Here's the word used in a sentence

from NPR by Glenn Weldon. The film chooses to render our doubty heroes super costumes as

cerulean blue roll-neck sweaters, which is a puzzling choice both aesthetically and practically.

Knitwear seems literally ill-fitted to daring-due.

There's no doubt that the word Dowdy has persevered in the English language.

It's traceable all the way back to the old English word dottig, but how to pronounce it.

One might assume that Doughty should be pronounced Doughty, paralleling similarly spelled words like bought and sought, or perhaps with a long O as in Doe. But the vowel sound in Dowdy is the same as doubt, and in fact over the centuries, Dowdy's spelling was sometimes confused with that of the now obsolete word,

Dowdy, D-O-U-B-T-Y, meaning full of doubt, which could be the reason we have the pronunciation we use today.

The homophonous Dowdy, D-O-W-D-Y, meaning having a dull or uninteresting appearance, can also be a source of

confusion. An easy way to remember the difference is that you can't spell Doughty with a T without the

letters in tough, T-O-U-G-H, meaning physically and emotionally strong. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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