It's Mary and Webster's word of the day for May 19th.

Today's word is sequester spelled SE Q U E S T E S T E R. Sequestor is a verb. To sequester a person or group is to keep them separate or apart from other people.

Sequester is also often used to mean to bind or absorb carbon dioxide as part of a larger chemical

process or compound.

Here's the word used in a sentence from Scientific American by Lucy Cook.

When sea otters were reintroduced to an Alaskan island, they led to the return of offshore kelp,

as well as harbouring hundreds of biodiverse species, these towering algal forests also sequester carbon.

Sequester is a word that has important legal and scientific uses

and a long history besides.

In fact, it can be traced back to the Latin preposition Seacous meaning well beside or alongside

Setting someone or something apart figuratively to the side from the rest is sequesters raisandetra. We frequently hear it in the context of

the courtroom as juries are sometimes sequestered for the safety of their members or to

prevent the influence of outside sources on a verdict.

It's also possible legally speaking to sequester property.

Sequester can mean both to seize and to deposit property by a writ of sequestration.

The scientific sense of sequester most often encountered these days

has to do with the binding or absorption of carbon.

Kelp forests, for example, sequester massive amounts of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis,

keeping it apart from the atmosphere.

By some estimates, doing so 20 times as much as

terrestrial forests. You might even say kelps got this sequestering thing locked

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

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