Word of the Day
: May 19, 2024sequester
playWhat It Means
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.”
// The jury was sequestered until a verdict was reached.
sequester in Context
“When sea otters were reintroduced to an Alaskan island, they … led to the return of offshore kelp. As well as harboring hundreds of biodiverse species, these towering algal forests also sequester carbon.” — Lucy Cooke, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2023
Did You Know?
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 secus, meaning, well, “beside” or “alongside.” Setting someone or something apart (figuratively “to the side”) from the rest is sequester’s raison d’être. 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 is 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 twenty times as much as terrestrial forests. You might even say kelp’s got this sequestering thing locked up.
