It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 28th.
Today's word is CAN, spelled K-E-N.
CAN is a noun.
It refers to someone's range of perception, knowledge, or understanding,
and is most often used in phrases like beyond or outside or within one's CAN.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the London Free Press of Ontario.
I'm still pretty much an amateur when it comes to gardening,
creating showy displays of florals along a pathway or verdant plots of perennials in shady backyard nooks.
Well, much of that is still beyond my ken.
I don't know my spurges from my wood roofs.
Need a word that can encompass all that one perceives, understands, or knows?
It's just ken.
Of course, whether someone is a president, writer, physicist, diplomat,
journalist, or even a stereotypical Barbie, everyone has their own personal can.
When someone says something is beyond it, they're not admitting to being a Gosling,
only that the topic or question at hand is beyond their particular range of knowledge or expertise.
can appeared on the English horizon in the 16th century,
referring to the distance bounding the range of ordinary vision at sea about 20 miles,
and would thus have been familiar to skippers in particular.
It's meaning soon-broadened, however, to mean range of vision or sight on land or sea.