It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day for February 12th.

Today's word is hagiography. It's also pronounced hagiography or hagiography and spelled

H-A-G-I-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y.

Hagiography is a noun.

It's a biography that idealizes or idolizes a person and their life.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the New York Times.

The sisters' show can sometimes feel like hagiography.

There is little discussion of Baskiat's demons or the aspects of his home life that may

have been difficult.

The second part of the word hagiography is familiar, the combining form graphi, G-R-A-P-H-Y,

which comes from the Greek verb graphine, meaning to write, and is found in biography and calligraphy

among many others. Haggio, however, is more unusual. It comes from a Greek word that meant

holy or sacred in ancient Greek, and more recently saintly, by way of the term hagiographer,

another term for the ketuvim, the third part of the Jewish scriptures.

English's word hagiography can refer to biography of actual saints, but it's more typically

applied to biography that treats ordinary human subjects as if they were saints. With your

word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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