It's the Word of the Day podcast for May 9th.
Today's word is gloss spelled G-L-O-S-S.
Gloss is a verb.
To gloss a word or phrase is to provide its meaning or in other words to explain or define it.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Darren M. McMahon.
It is revealing that early dictionaries regularly defined equality as conformity or glossed the word,
like Noah Webster did in 1806, as likeness, evenness, uniformity.
If you're the type of word nerd who finds poring over book glossaries to be the bee's knees,
we know you'll get a buzz from this gloss of the word gloss.
To gloss something, such as a word or phrase, is to explain or define it.
The noun gloss, it follows, refers to,
among other things, a brief explanation of a word or expression.
And a glossary, of course, is a collection of textual glosses,
or of specialized terms, with their meanings.
Both forms of the word gloss, as well as the word glossary,
trace back to the Greek noun glossa,
meaning tongue, language, or obscure word requiring explanation.
Another descendant of glossa, the English noun glossa, refers not to a bee's knees,
but to a bee's tongue, or to the tongue of another insect.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.