Word of the Day

: August 25, 2018

jaunty

adjective JAWN-tee

What It Means

: sprightly in manner or appearance : lively

jaunty in Context

"Hitching his wistful voice and elegant violin to a jaunty tempo suggesting an Appalachian hoedown, Andrew Bird evokes a sense of restless longing on this album, his 12th." — Jon Young, Mother Jones, March/April 2012

"All this, Twain relates in a jaunty, first-person style, almost a cleaned-up, more formal version of the voice he used in his previous novel, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1885)." — Michael Dirda, The Washington Post, 3 July 2018

Did You Know?

You might not guess that the words jaunty and genteel are related—but they are. Both words evolved from the French word gentil, which carried the sense of "noble." At first jaunty was used, like genteel, for things aristocratic, but as the years went by people stopped using it that way. Today jaunty is used to describe things that are lively and perky rather than things that are aristocratic and elegant.