It's the Word of the Day for March 7th.

Today's word is libertine, spelled L-I-B-E-R-T-I-N-E.

Libertine is a noun.

A libertine is, in broad terms, a person who is unrestrained by

convention or morality. More narrowly, the word describes someone who leads an immoral life.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the ledger of Lakeland, Florida. As horrifying as some of the

sins of Victorian scholarship may have been,

it would have been anathema to these students of classical philosophy to simply throw out

Plato. But that's what some of their modern inheritors have tried to do. It's worth noting

that we might not have Plato's work at all, were it not

carefully studied and preserved by the Islamic scholars, hardly libertines themselves, of the

medieval period. I only ask to be free, says Mr. Skimpol in Dickens's Bleak House, his words would undoubtedly have appealed to the world's

first libertines. The word libertine comes from the Latin libertinus, a word used in early writings of

Roman antiquity to describe a formerly enslaved person who had been set free.

The Roman term for an emancipated person was the Latin word libertus.

Middle English speakers used the word libertine to refer to a freedman,

but by the late 1500s, its meaning was extended to free thinkers,

both religious and secular,

and it later came to imply that an individual was a little too unrestrained, especially in moral affairs.

The likely Latin root of libertine is Liber, the ultimate source of our word, liberty.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokoloski.

Visit marianwebster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.

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