It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 9th.

Today's word is gloss, spelled G-L-O-S-S. Gloss is a verb. To gloss a word or phrase is to provide its meaning,

or in other words, to explain or define it.

Here's the word used in a sentence from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Darren M. McMahon.

It is revealing that early dictionary is regularly defined equality as conformity, or glossed the word,

like Noah Webster did in 1806 as likeness, evenness, uniformity.

If you're the type of word nerd who finds pouring over book glossaries to be the bee's knees,

we know you'll get a buzz from this gloss of the word gloss.

To gloss something, such as a word or phrase, is to explain or

define it. The noun gloss it follows refers to, among other things, a brief explanation of a word

or expression. And a glossary, of course, is a collection of textual glosses or of specialized terms

with their meanings. Both forms of the word gloss as

well as the word glossary trace back to the Greek noun Glosa meaning tongue language or obscure

word requiring explanation. Another descendant of Glosa, the English noun Glossa, refers not to a bee's knees, but to a

bee's tongue or to the tongue of another insect. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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