It's the Word of the Day for January 28th.

Today's word is S-W-A-R-D, spelled S-W-A-R-D.

Sword is a noun. It's a literary word that refers to an area of land covered with grass.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the Boston Globe by Veronique Greenwood.

A century or so ago, if you lived in the Boston area and were obsessed with trees, you were in good company.

The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which had united enthusiasts of rare apples

and ornamental maples since 1832, had helped found Mount Auburn Cemetery and endowed it with

an immense exotic plant collection. Tree mania seems to have come late to Greenlawn, however,

photographs taken sometime before 1914

show a bleak bear sward.

The word sward sprouted from the old English words, sward or swarth, meaning skin or rind.

It was originally used as a term for the skin of the body before being extended to

another surface, that of the earth. The word's specific grassy sense dates to the 16th century

and lives on today, mostly in novels from centuries past, such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the

Derbervilles in this sentence. The sun was so near the ground and the sward so flat

that the shadows of Claire and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them,

like two long fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches

abutted against the sloping slides of the veil.

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

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