It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 8th.

Today's word is modicum, also pronounced modicum, and spelled M-O-D-I-C-U-M.

Modicum is a noun.

It's a formal word that means a small amount. It's almost always used

with the word of. Here's the word used in a sentence from the word of dog, what our canine

companions can't teach us about living a good life by Mark Rowlands. Imagine, for example, that the gods

decided to bestow upon Sisy a modicum of mercy, the rock, for example, that the gods decided to bestow upon Sisyphus a modicum of mercy.

The rock, the hill, the never-ending pointless labor, all remained non-negotiable as far as the

gods were concerned, but the mercy of the gods was to change Sisyphus' attitude to these things.

He is never happier than when rolling large boulders up steep hills,

and the gods have offered him the eternal fulfillment of this strange desire. It wouldn't be wrong

to say that the English language has more than a modicum of words referring to a small amount of

something. It has oodles from smidgen to soupsons.

But while modicum can be applied to countable or physical things like words or salt,

it is almost always applied instead to abstract concepts like respect, success, control,

hope, dignity, or privacy.

Modicum traces back to the Latin noun modus, meaning measure,

which just so happens to be the ancestor of more than a modicum of English words,

from moderate and modify to mold and commode.

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

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