It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 3rd.
Today's word is sleuth, spelled S-L-E-U-T-H.
Sleuth is a verb.
To sleuth is to carefully or methodically search for information or to act as a detective.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Vogue by Lila Ramsey.
To fill the market with vintage treasure,
we called upon some of the industry's best dressed to sleuth through eBay and curate their must-haves.
They were the footprints of a gigantic hound.
Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer.
It was a case of art imitating etymology.
When Middle English speakers first borrowed the word sleuth from the Old Norse word sloth,
the term referred to the track of an animal or person.
In Scotland,
sleuth-hund referred to a kind of bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice.
In 19th century American English, sleuth-hound,
soon shortened to sleuth, began to be used for a detective.
From there, sleuth slipped into verb use to apply to what a sleuth does.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.