It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 7th.

Today's word is enigmatic, spelled E-N-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.

Anigmatic is an adjective.

Someone or something described as anigmatic is mysterious and

difficult to understand. Here's the word used. In a sentence from Threads of Empire, a history of the

world in 12 carpets by Dorothy Armstrong. For 30 years, Perlefter's carpet hung peacefully on the wall in the museum, delighting visitors

with its beauty, its unusual palette, enigmatic motifs, and its echoes of four empires.

The noun Enigma can refer to a puzzle, a riddle, a question mark.

It's no mystery then that the adjective

enigmatic describes what is hard to solve or figure out. An enigmatic person, for example,

may be someone with a bit of jeanasse qua. What's behind a stranger's enigmatic smile? Your guess is as good as ours. Does the vocabulary in the

short story you're reading render it a tad enigmatic? Better grab a dictionary. Both enigma and

enigmatic come from the Greek verb anisesthii, meaning to speak in riddles. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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