It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 29th.

Today's word is nascent, also pronounced nascent, and spelled N-A-S-C-E-N-T.

Nacent is an adjective. It's a formal word used to describe something that is just

beginning to exist or, in other words, is recently formed or developed. Here's the word used in a

sentence from lithub.com by Fiona Warnick. I asked my father recently if I might borrow one of his

old journals as research for a nascent writing project.

It felt like there might be something there in the poetry of varietal names,

Beatties Camden Cale, Ruby Perfection Cabbage, or the steady plotless attention to the natural world.

The word nascent descends from the Latin verb NASChi, meaning to be born, as does many an English word,

from nation and nature to innate and renaissance. But rather than describing the birth of literal babies,

as in pups, kits, or hoglets, nascent is applied to things such as careers or technologies

that have recently formed or come into existence,

as when scholar Danielle K. Taylor Guthrie wrote of Tony Morrison being an integral part of a nascent group of black women writers

who would alter the course of African American, American and world literature.

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

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