It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 19.
Today's word is lethargic, spelled L-E-T-H-A-R-G-I-C.
Lethargic is an adjective.
It describes people who feel a lack of energy or a lack of interest in doing things.
It's sometimes used figuratively, as in a sluggish and lethargic economy.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
After igniting a somewhat lethargic, heat-exhausted audience in the fifth,
baseball player Matt Olson earned further cheers in the seventh as the brave's onslaught continued.
In Greek mythology,
Lethe was the name of a river in the underworld that was also called the River of Unmindfulness or the River of Forgetfulness.
Legend held that when someone died,
they were given a drink of water from the river Lethe to forget all about their past life.
Eventually, this act of forgetting came to be associated with feelings of sluggishness,
inactivity, or indifference.
The name of the river and the word lethargic,
as well as the related noun lethargy, all come from Lethe, Greek for forgetfulness.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
Visit MiriamWebster.com today for definitions, word play, and trending word lookups.