Word of the Day

: September 23, 2019

suffuse

verb suh-FYOOZ

What It Means

: to spread over or through in the manner of fluid or light : flush, fill

suffuse in Context

"Also beguiling … are such installation works as 'Spatial Environment in Red Light'…. It's a walk-through enclosure containing six parallel corridors and suffused with a neon redness that, having saturated your optic nerves, turns the world green when you exit." — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2019

"The dessert I still dream about from the summer of 2018 is … a creamy, multi-textured bonbon suffused … with the flavor of black licorice from Denmark. — Jeff Gordinier, Esquire, 28 Nov. 2018

Did You Know?

The Latin word suffendere, ancestor to suffuse by way of Latin suffūsus, has various meanings that shed light on our modern word, among them "to pour on or in (as an addition)" and "to fill with a liquid, color, or light that wells up from below." Suffundere is a blend of the prefix sub- ("under" or "beneath") and the verb fundere ("to pour" or "to send forth"). Other English verbs related to fundere continue the theme of pouring or spreading: diffuse ("to pour out and spread freely"), effuse ("to pour or flow out"), transfuse ("to cause to pass from one to another"), and the verb fuse itself when it's used to mean "to meld or join."