It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 6th.
Today's word is acapella, spelled as two words A, C, A,
P, P, E, L, L, A. Acapella is an adverb or adjective.
When a song is performed acapella, it is sung unaccompanied by instrumental music.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Billboard by Kyle Dennis.
In a video posted to Twitter,
H-E-R delivers a hauntingly beautiful cover of Coldplay's classic Fix You,
which peaked at number 59 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005.
Backed by four of her background singers, H-E-R belts out the 2005 hit completely a cappella.
A capella arrived in English in the 18th century via the Italian phrase a capella,
meaning in chapel or choir style.
Medieval Latin's word capella, meaning chapel, is the source of the English word chapel.
The a capella style reached preeminence in the late 16th century in the music that composer Giovanni Pierluigi della Pastrina wrote for the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican.
Because no independent instrumental parts were written down,
scholars once thought that the choir sang unaccompanied.
But current evidence makes clear that an organ or other instruments doubled some or several of the vocal parts.
Regardless, today Acapella describes a purely vocal performance.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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