It's the word of the day for October 6th.
Today's word is berate, also pronounced berate, and spelled B-E-R-A-T-E.
Berate is a verb.
To berate someone is to angrily scold or criticize them, often loudly and at length.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Wired.
The autonomous vehicles, which provide tens of thousands of rides each week,
have been torched, stomped on, and verbally berated in recent months.
People have berated things and each other for time immemorial,
but the word berate has only been known to English users since the mid-1500s.
Before that, if you wanted to angrily rebuke, say an outlaw,
for impersonating a fortune teller in order to steal the golden hubcaps off your royal carriage,
you would rate them.
But rate simply added the prefix B, B-E, to the existing verb rate,
which is distinct from the rate that means to value or esteem.
While the more familiar rate comes ultimately from Latin,
the origins of the less common, scolding rate are obscure.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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