It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 25th.
Today's word is ilk, spelled I-L-K.
ilk is a noun.
It means sort or kind.
It's usually used in short phrases with and or of, as in and that ilk or of their ilk.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Rolling Stone by Denise Kiernan.
When they weren't working, Oak Ridgers found plenty to keep them occupied.
There were sports teams, clubs of every ilk, bowling alleys, and dances most nights of the week.
The noun ilk comes from the old English pronoun ilk-a-i-l-c-a by way of a pronoun.
that's still in use but not in most modern English dialects.
That ilk is synonymous with the word same,
and persists chiefly in Scotland where it's used in the phrase of that ilk,
meaning of the same place, territorial designation, or name.
It's generally used in reference to the names of land-owning families and their eponymous estates,
as in the grants of that ilk, which means the grants of grant.
In the late 1700s, the Scots phrase extended to mean of that kind or sort,
a usage that found its way into modern English.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.