It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day for February 2nd.

Today's word is prescience, spelled P-R-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.

Prescience is a noun. It's a formal word used to refer to the ability to see or anticipate what will or might happen in the future.

Here's the word used in a sentence from The Dial by Jesse Gesefka Stevens.

Novelists have always faced technological and social upheaval. They have mostly addressed it in one of two ways. The first is to imagine an altered future with the prescience of science fiction. Mary Shelley's warning that humans are not always in control of their creations is, if anything, even more resonant today than when Frankenstein

was first published in 1818.

If you know the origin of the word science, you already know half the story of the word prescience.

Science comes from the Latin verb scio-ski-ray, meaning to know, also a source of such words as conscience, conscious, and

omniscience. Prashence has, as its ancestor, a word that attached Pry, a predecessor of the prefix

pre, to this word to make prescere, meaning to know beforehand.

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

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