It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 7th.
Today's word is reify, also pronounced reify, and spelled R-E-I-F-Y.
Reify is a verb.
Reifying is about considering or representing something abstract as a material or concrete thing.
If you reify a concept or idea, you somehow give it definite content and form.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Time.
Evolutionary theory and experimental evidence reveals that race is not a natural category.
We evolved alongside people who looked like us.
And social categories we create and reify affect perceptions of who is them and who is us.
Reify is a word that attempts to provide a bridge between what is abstract and what is concrete.
Fittingly, it comes from a word that is an ancestor of the word real,
the Latin noun race, meaning thing.
Both Reify and the related noun reification first appeared in English in the mid-19th century.
Each word combines the Latin race with an English suffix, f-y, or fic-ation, respectively.
That comes from the Latin verb vicare, meaning to make.
In general use,
the words refer to the act of considering or presenting an abstract idea or concept in real or material terms,
or of assessing something by use of a concrete example.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.