Word of the Day

: October 5, 2023

aficionado

noun uh-fish-ee-uh-NAH-doh

What It Means

Aficionado is a synonym of devotee and refers to someone who both likes and knows a lot about a given interest or subject.

// Mickey’s brother, an aficionado of jazz, was a regular at the downtown clubs and often bought new records on the day they were released.

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aficionado in Context

"The love of coffee for Ezra Coffee founder Jessica Taylor blossomed early during a visit with her grandparents. 'I've been loving coffee ever since my sister and I started drinking it with our grandfather. We were seven and five years old,' recalls Taylor about how the sisters’ curiosity for the beverage their grandfather was drinking led to a whole new world of flavor. 'By the time our parents came to pick us up, we had our pinkies up, we had our little mugs, we were coffee aficionados,' laughs the entrepreneur, whose passion for java continued into adulthood." — Jocelyn Amador, CuisineNoirMag.com, 29 Aug. 2023

Did You Know?

Before there were nerds, geeks, stans, fanboys, or fangirls, there were aficionados. But not long before, relatively speaking. English borrowed aficionado in the early 1800s directly from Spanish, making a noun out of the past participle of the Spanish verb aficionar, which means "to inspire affection." Nerd, geek, and the rest can sometimes imply that the devotee in question is overdoing their ardor, but aficionado (which traces further back to the same Latin ancestor that gave us the English word affection) is a more neutral descriptor for someone with an abiding and thoughtful devotion to an interest or activity.