It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 22nd.
Today's word is derth, spelled D-E-A-R-T-H.
Derth is a noun.
It refers to a lack or inadequate supply.
It usually is followed by the word of.
Here's the word used in a sentence from lithub.com by Katie Guy Salisbury.
Of course,
it's one thing to survey the marketplace and acknowledge the dearth of female voices in genres like history and biography.
It's another entirely to understand in practical terms how the absence of female perspectives affects the way history is told,
to recognize the threads that go unexplored or are never thought of in the first place.
The word dearth has, in one form or another,
been used to refer to scarcity since at least the 13th century,
when it often referred specifically to the plague of famine as in a time of dearth,
whether brought on by an insidious crop disease or by invaders.
The word traces back to the old English adjective diore, meaning deer.
That notion of dearness or importance endures in the word dearth,
which implies the absence or scarcity of not just any old thing,
but of something one wants or needs.
A dearth of malls, for example, would be the bane of a woodcutter's existence.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.