It's Marian Webster's Word of the Day for February 12th.
Today's word is Hagiography.
It's also pronounced Hagiography or Hagiography and spelled H-A-G-I-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y.
Hagiography is a noun.
It's a biography that idealizes or idolizes a person and their life.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The New York Times.
The second part of the word hagiography is familiar, the combining form graphy, G-R-A-P-H-Y,
which comes from the Greek verb graphine, meaning to write,
and is found in biography and calligraphy, among many others.
Haggio, however, is more unusual.
It comes from a Greek word that meant holy or sacred in ancient Greek, and more recently, saintly,
by way of the term hagiographa, another term for the ketuvim,
the third part of the Jewish scriptures.
English's word hagiography can refer to biography of actual saints,
but it's more typically applied to biography that treats ordinary human subjects
as if they were saints.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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