Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 23, 2012 is:

menagerie • \muh-NAJ-uh-ree\  • noun
1 a : a place where animals are kept and trained especially for exhibition b : a collection of wild or foreign animals kept especially for exhibition 2: a varied mixture

Examples:
The Alpine-themed restaurant had a curious menagerie of cuckoo clocks on the wall of its dining room.

"Since 2001, thousands of schoolchildren have made the trip to get up close with the preserve menagerie of between 100 and 150 animals, from pigs and geese to tigers and lions." — Eric Staats, Naples Daily News (Florida), May 12, 2012

Did you know?
Back in the days of Middle French, "ménagerie" meant "the management of a household or farm" or "a place where animals are tended." By the 1670s, English speakers had adopted the word but dropped its housekeeping aspects, applying it specifically to the places where circuses and other exhibitions kept show animals. Later, the word was generalized to refer to any varied mixture, especially one that includes things that are strange or foreign to one's experience.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 22, 2012 is:

proficient • \pruh-FISH-unt\  • adjective
: well advanced in an art, occupation, or branch of knowledge

Examples:
When he attended an outdoor adventure camp, Mark became proficient at identifying animal tracks.

"Red Sox catcher Ryan Lavarnway was optioned to Triple-A Pawtucket on Sunday…. Always proficient at the plate, Lavarnway did have an impressive spring batting, with a .429/.488/.486 line in 35 at-bats." — From an article by Evan Drellic at MLB.com, April 1, 2012

Did you know?
If you are proficient or adept at something you are skillful — perhaps even expert. "Proficient," "adept," "skillful," and "expert" are all synonyms, but subtle differences can be discerned between these terms as well. "Proficient" usually describes pure ability that comes from training and practice ("a proficient writer"). "Adept" suggests an innate ability as well as a learned skill ("an adept card player"). "Skillful" suggests being very able at a particular task ("a skillful surgeon"). "Expert" suggests having a thorough knowledge of a subject as well as being very skillful at working in it ("expert in the martial arts").

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 21, 2012 is:

boniface • \BAH-nuh-fuss\  • noun
: the proprietor of a hotel, nightclub, or restaurant

Examples:
Jones' retirement will be celebrated, but it also means that for the first time in 45 years, the city's oldest hotel is in need of a new boniface.

"Vince Bommarito, boniface of Tony's restaurant at 410 Market Street, said last week was one of his busiest in years and that this week is shaping up to look the same." — From "Deb Peterson's Breaking Schmooze" blog at stltoday.com (Web site of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), October 18, 2011

Did you know?
"Boniface" has been the name of eight popes, one antipope, and one saint, but none of those had anything (directly) to do with the English word "boniface." The word "boniface" comes from the name of the jovial innkeeper in George Farquhar's 1707 play "The Beaux' Strategem," the story of two penniless rakes who determine that one of them must find and marry a wealthy lady. Farquhar's play made more than one contribution to the English language. The name of the character of Lady Bountiful is a byword for a generous (and often conspicuously so) philanthropist. Farquhar, incidentally, never got to see the influence his play had on the lexicon. He finished "The Beaux' Strategem" on his deathbed, and died on the night of its third performance.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 20, 2012 is:

hypnagogic • \hip-nuh-GAH-jik\  • adjective
: of, relating to, or occurring in the period of drowsiness immediately preceding sleep

Examples:
"People who play lots of computer games sometimes experience 'screen dreams' as they fall asleep, in which they see vivid images of the game they have been playing. These screen dreams are also products of the hypnagogic state." — From Paul Martin's Counting Sheep, 2002

"These hallucinations, called hypnagogic hallucinations, may occur when falling quickly into REM sleep, as you do when you first fall asleep, or upon waking." — From an article by Jeff Barnet in the Las Cruces Sun-News, January 11, 2011

Did you know?
"The hypnagogic state is that heady lull between wakefulness and sleep when thoughts and images flutter, melt, and transform into wild things," wrote Boston Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid (October 1, 1998). Some scientists have attributed alien-abduction stories to this state, but for most people these "half-dreams" are entirely innocuous. Perhaps the most famous hypnagogic dream is that of the German chemist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, who was inspired with the concept of the benzene ring by a vision of a snake biting its own tail. You're not dreaming if the Greek root "hypn-," meaning "sleep," seems familiar — you've seen it in "hypnotize." The root "-agogic" is from the Greek "-agōgos," meaning "inducing," from "agein" meaning "to lead." We borrowed "hypnagogic" (also spelled "hypnogogic") from French "hypnagogique" in the late 19th century.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 19, 2012 is:

shanghai • \shang-HYE\  • verb
1 a : to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug b : to put by force or threat of force into or as if into a place of detention 2 : to put by trickery into an undesirable position

Examples:
Nick was shanghaied by Erika into helping out at the charity fundraiser after her first volunteer bailed out.

"In time, the new novel, lurching around his psyche, dragged itself away and became real. How I loved to see him shanghaied like that, careening down the rum-soaked wharves of imagination, where any roustabout idea might turn to honest labor." — From Diane Ackerman's 2011 book One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

Did you know?
In the 1800s, long sea voyages were very difficult and dangerous, so people were understandably hesitant to become sailors. But sea captains and shipping companies needed crews to sail their ships, so they gathered sailors any way they could — even if that meant resorting to kidnapping by physical force or with the help of liquor or drugs. The word "shanghai" comes from the name of the Chinese city of Shanghai. People started to use the city's name for that unscrupulous way of obtaining sailors because the East was often a destination of ships that had kidnapped men onboard as crew.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 18, 2012 is:

gazette • \guh-ZET\  • noun
1 : newspaper 2 : an official journal 3 British : an announcement in an official gazette

Examples:
I asked my brother to pick up the monthly car-buyer's gazette when he went into town.

"On May 2, 2012, Wynn Macau's land concession contract was published in the official gazette of Macau." — From an article in Business Wire, May 7, 2012

Did you know?
You are probably familiar the word "gazette" from its use in the names of a number of newspapers, but the original Gazettes were a series of bulletins published in England in the 17th and early 18th centuries. These official journals contained notices of government appointments and promotions, as well as items like bankruptcies, property transfers, and engagements. In British English, "gazette" can also refer to the kind of announcement that one might find in such a publication. It can also be used as a verb meaning "to announce or publish in a gazette." The word derives via French from Italian "gazetta." A related word is "gazetteer," which we now use for a dictionary of place names, but which once meant "journalist" or "publicist."

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 17, 2012 is:

maffick • \MAF-ik\  • verb
: to celebrate with boisterous rejoicing and hilarious behavior

Examples:
Fans mafficked for hours outside the stadium, celebrating the team's dramatic victory in the division championship.

"In half an hour, after the mildest of mafficking, the last visitors of the exhibition's last day had gone out of the gates and the staff began their final acts of closing up shop." — From an article in The Guardian (London), October 1, 2011

Did you know?
"Maffick" is an alteration of Mafeking Night, the British celebration of the lifting of the siege of a British military outpost during the South African War at the town of Mafikeng (also spelled Mafeking) on May 17, 1900. The South African War was fought between the British and the Afrikaners, who were Dutch and Huguenot settlers originally called Boers, over the right to govern frontier territories. Though the war did not end until 1902, the lifting of the siege of Mafikeng was a significant victory for the British because they held out against a larger Afrikaner force for 217 days until reinforcements could arrive. The rejoicing in British cities on news of the rescue produced "maffick," a word that was popular for a while, especially in journalistic writing, but is now relatively uncommon.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 16, 2012 is:

argot • \AHR-goh\  • noun
: an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group

Examples:
The town's selectmen decided to hire a consultant to sort through the bureaucratic argot of the community development grant application.

"What makes the play work, though, is that the rich insider's argot spoken by Mr. Leight's characters is used not to show how much he knows, but to set the scene for a stinging tale of youthful hope and bitter disappointment, one whose implications are universal." — From a theater review by Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2012

Did you know?
We borrowed "argot" from French in the mid-1800s, although our language already had several words covering its meaning. There was "jargon," which harks back to Anglo-French by way of Middle English (where it meant "twittering of birds"); it had been used for specialized (and often obscure or pretentious) vocabulary since the 1600s. There was also "lingo," which had been around for almost a hundred years, and which is connected to the Latin word “lingua" ("language"). English novelist and lawyer Henry Fielding used it of "court gibberish" -- what we tend to call "legalese." In fact, the suffixal ending "-ese" is a newer means of indicating arcane vocabulary. One of its very first applications at the turn of the 20th century was for "American 'golfese.'"

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 15, 2012 is:

accident • \AK-suh-dunt\  • noun
1 a : an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance b : lack of intention or necessity : chance 2 : an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance 3 : a nonessential property or quality of an entity or circumstance

Examples:
Following the second work-related accident in two weeks, operations at the factory were shut down so that a thorough safety review could be conducted.

"Too many kids — by accident of birth — start life with the odds against them, and too many schools don't do much to improve those odds." — From an article in The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington), December 9, 2011

Did you know?
"Accident" is just one of many words in the English language to come down to us from the Latin verb "cadere," meaning "to fall." Among the others are "deciduous" (an adjective used to describe something, such as leaves, which fall off or shed seasonally or at a certain stage of development in the life cycle), "cascade" (which can mean, among other things, "a steep fall of water" or "something falling or rushing forth"),"cadence" ("a falling inflection of the voice"), and "decay" ("to fall into ruin"). "Chance," which functions as a synonym of "accident" in one sense, is also a "cadere" descendant.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 14, 2012 is:

skulk • \SKULK\  • verb
1 : to move in a stealthy or furtive manner 2 : to hide or conceal something (as oneself) often out of cowardice or fear or with sinister intent b chiefly British : malinger

Examples:
"I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed." — From Henry David Thoreau's 1854 collection of essays, Walden

"These handsome gray birds … are usually found skulking amid the shadows of shrubs and thickets below a forest canopy." — From an article by Gary Phillips at MyrtleBeachOnline.com, April, 11, 2012

Did you know?
Here's one for the word-puzzle lovers. Can you name three things that the word "skulk" has in common with all of these other words: booth, brink, cog, flit, give, kid, meek, scab, seem, skull and wing? If you noticed that all of the terms on that list have just one syllable, then you've got the first (easy) similarity, but the next two are likely to prove a little harder to guess. Do you give up? All of the words listed above are of Scandinavian origin and all were first recorded in English in the 13th century. As for "skulk," its closest known Scandinavian relative is the Norwegian dialect word "skulka," which means "to lie in wait" or "lurk."

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 13, 2012 is:

hiatus • \hye-AY-tus\  • noun
1 a : a break in or as if in a material object : gap b : a gap or passage in an anatomical part or organ 2 a : an interruption in time or continuity : break; especially : a period when something (as a program or activity) is suspended or interrupted b : the occurrence of two vowel sounds without pause or intervening consonantal sound

Examples:
The band released several hit albums in the '90s and aughts, and then went on hiatus.

"Wasting no time, Joshua Michael Stern is set to begin principal photography in May while [Ashton] Kutcher is on hiatus from the CBS sitcom 'Two and a Half Men.' Kutcher is a natural to play Jobs; the resemblance between the two is unmistakable." — From an article by Pamela McClintock in The Hollywood Reporter, April 1, 2012

Did you know?
"Hiatus" comes from "hiare," a Latin verb meaning "to gape" or "to yawn," and first appeared in English in the middle of the 16th century. Originally, the word referred to a gap or opening in something, such as a cave opening in a cliff. In the 18th century, Laurence Sterne used the word humorously in his novel Tristram Shandy, writing of "the hiatus in Phutatorius's breeches." These days, "hiatus" is usually used in a temporal sense to refer to a pause or interruption (as in a song), or a period during which an activity is temporarily suspended (such as a hiatus from teaching).