Word of the Day

: February 4, 2015

quotidian

adjective kwoh-TID-ee-un

What It Means

1 : occurring every day

2 : belonging to each day : everyday

3 : commonplace, ordinary

quotidian in Context

After weeks on the road, it felt good to be back to our quotidian routines.

"Some of Bach's music is a prime example of how even works of genius can be destroyed in the wrong hands. The Cello Suites were deemed quotidian exercises until Pablo Casals revealed their beauty." - Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, January 2, 2015

Did You Know?

In Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, "seems to have the quotidian of love upon him." Shakespeare's use doesn't make it clear that quotidian derives from a Latin word that means "every day." But as odd as it may seem, Shakespeare's use of quotidian is just a short semantic step away from the "daily" adjective sense. Some fevers occur intermittently-sometimes daily. The phrase quotidian fever and the noun quotidian have long been used for such recurring maladies. Poor Orlando is simply afflicted with such a "fever" of love.