Word of the Day

: March 23, 2019

reverberate

verb rih-VER-buh-rayt

What It Means

1 : to reflect or become reflected

2 : to repel or become driven back

3 : to continue in or as if in a series of echoes : resound

reverberate in Context

"Inmates' relatives began protesting outside the jail. Inmates responded by banging on the inside of their windows, the clangs and thuds reverberating in the street below." — Jon Schuppe, NBCNews.com, 5 Feb. 2019

"The hiring went off like a sonic boom in Hollywood, reverberating to the highest levels of rival studios." — Brooks Barnes, The New York Times, 17 Feb. 2019

Did You Know?

The letter sequence "v-e-r-b" in reverberate might make you think at first of such word-related brethren as proverb, verbal, and verbose, all of which derive from the Latin noun verbum, meaning "word." In fact, reverberate comes from a much different source: the Latin verb verberare, meaning "to whip, beat, or lash," which is related to the noun verber, meaning "rod." Reverberate entered the English language in the 15th century, and one of its early meanings was "to beat, drive, or cast back." By the early 1600s, it began to appear in contexts associated with sound that repeats or returns the way an echo does.