It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 21st.
Today's word is vulnerable, spelled V-U-L-N-E-R-A-B-L-E.
Vulnerable is an adjective.
A person described as vulnerable in a general way is someone who is easily hurt or harmed physically,
mentally, or emotionally.
Vulnerable can also describe a person, group, or thing that is open to attack, harm, or damage.
Both senses of vulnerable are often followed by the preposition, too.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Tampa Bay Times by Mike Ayala Mulligan.
A pilot study found the area is particularly vulnerable to dangerous temperatures.
The study found an abundance of asphalt and concrete coupled with a lack of greenery was leading to an urban heat island effect,
which traps heat and can ratchet up temperatures more than 10 degrees.
Superheroes are often depicted in comic books and movies as all-powerful deflecting boulders and missiles and mid-air with a flick of the wrist walking through walls and having indestructible skeletons and whatnot.
Fans know, however, that even the mightiest, meatiest protagonist is vulnerable to something,
be it kryptonite or forgetting the whereabouts of one's hammer.
Vulnerable ultimately comes from the Latin noun volnus, meaning wound, by way of late Latin,
the adjective vulnerabilis, which English speakers adopted as vulnerable in the early 1600s.
Vulnerable continues to carry its original meaning of capable of being physically wounded,
but since the late 1600s it has also been used figuratively to suggest a defenselessness against non-physical attacks.
In other words, someone or something can be vulnerable to criticism or failure,
as well as to literal wounding, even superheroes.