It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 10th.
Today's word is ungainly, spelled U-N-G-A-I-N-L-Y.
Ungainly is an adjective.
It usually describes someone or something moving in an awkward or clumsy way,
or the awkward, clumsy movements themselves.
It can also describe an object that is difficult to handle,
especially because of being large or heavy, or someone or something that has an awkward appearance.
Here's the word used in A Sentence from the Chicago Sun by Kyle McMillan.
Composer Giacchino Rossini, who was just 25 at the time and his librettist Giacobo Ferretti,
turned this Cinderella into a comedy.
It contains all kinds of farcical elements, including hidden identities,
and the wonderfully exaggerated stepsisters who are delightfully mean, self-involved, and ungainly.
What do you have to gain by knowing the root of the word ungainly?
Plenty.
The gain and ungainly is an obsolete English adjective meaning direct,
that ultimately comes from the old Norse preposition gang, meaning against.
It is unrelated to the noun in economic gains, or the verb gain in advantage.
Those came to English by way of Anglo-French.
Ungainly can describe someone who is clumsy, as in a tall, ungainly man,
or something that causes you to feel clumsy when you try to handle it,