Word of the Day

: September 7, 2025

behest

noun bih-HEST

What It Means

Behest can refer either to an authoritative order or an urgent prompting.

// The committee met again at the senator’s behest.

// At the behest of her friends, Marcie read the poem aloud.

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behest in Context

“... Raymond Carver and I were selecting stories for our American Short Story Masterpieces. When Ray and I worked on our selections, we would meet in Manhattan, where I lived, or in Syracuse, New York, where he lived. ... Each morning we’d read and then meet for lunch and talk about what we’d read. After lunch we’d read some more, and at dinner we talked about the afternoon’s reading. Sometimes we’d reread at the other’s behest.” — Tom Jenks, LitHub.com, 2 Aug. 2024

Did You Know?

In Return of the Jedi, the villain Darth Vader speaks with an old-timey flair when he asks his boss, the Emperor, for instructions: “What is thy bidding, my master?” If the film’s screenwriters wanted him to sound even more old-timey, however, they could have chosen to have him ask “What is thy behest?” As a word for a command or order, behest predates bidding in English by a couple centuries, dating all the way back—long, long ago, though still in this galaxy—to the 1100s. Its Old English ancestor, the noun behǣs, referred to a promise, a meaning that continued on in Middle English especially in the phrase “the land of behest” but is now obsolete. The “command” sense of behest is still in good use, typically referring to an authoritative order, whether from an emperor or some other high-ranking figure. Behest is now also used with a less forceful meaning; it can refer to an urgent prompting, as in “an anniversary showing of classic films at the behest of the franchise’s fans.”