It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 19th.
Today's word is approbation, spelled A-P-P-R-O-B-A-T-I-O-N.
Approbation is a noun.
It's a formal word that refers to praise or approval.
Here's the word used in a sentence from psychology today.
That's not to say that all slang terms end up on the ash heap of history.
Some of them break out and become incredibly popular.
The most successful by far is OK, which has become a universal means for expressing approbation.
OK has been adopted into many other languages,
and it may be the most widely used expression on the planet.
Approbation is similar in meaning to approval, and it is also very close to approval etymologically.
Both words trace back to the Latin verb approbare, meaning to prove or to approve.
Approbation meant proof when it first appeared in English in the 1300s,
and by the early 1500s it had come to refer to the act of formally or officially approving something,
a sense it still retains in certain church-related contexts.
Today, however, we mostly use approbation in the looser sense of approval, admiration, or praise.
The related verb approbate means to approve or sanction,
and the adjective approbatory means expressing approval or commendation.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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