It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 1st.
Today's word is cintilla, spelled S-C-I-N-T-I-L-L-A.
Cintilla is a noun.
A cintilla is a very small amount of something.
Cintilla is usually used in negative statements, as in not even or nary a cintilla.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Stranger's House,
writing Northern Ireland by Alexander Poots.
There was one part of his Irish childhood that would follow Oscar Wilde across the sea to England,
a tiny part of his childhood admittedly, the nearest scintilla of his youth.
Wonder what scintillas or scintillae are?
It may help spark your memory to look up above the world so high at the tiny,
to our eyes, stars twinkling like diamonds in the sky.
Scintilla comes directly from Latin,
where it refers to a spark that is a bright flash such as you might see from a burning ember.
The noun scintilla is related to the verb scintillare, which means to sparkle,
and is responsible for the English verb scintillate, meaning to sparkle or gleam.
In the 17th century, English carried over this glittering particle sense,
which is still in use today,
as when Scottish writer Rudy Zygadlo wrote of the Gulf of Mexico fizzing with scintillas underneath the rising sun.
In the same century,