It's the Word of the Day podcast for June 28th.
Today's word is restive, spelled R-E-S-T-I-V-E.
Restive is an adjective.
It can describe a person or group feeling impatience or uneasiness,
or it can describe someone who is stubbornly resistant to control.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Nation.
One of the most important triggers for industrial revolution in England was the draining of the population from the rural areas into the cities.
This meant that there was a growing shortage of agricultural workers and a concomitant fall in food production both in terms of quality and quantity.
The immediate consequence was that available food not only became more expensive,
but increasingly so with time.
Under these circumstances, the workers became restive,
demanding the provision of the food they needed to save themselves from starvation.
The word restive is descended from the Anglo-French verb rester,
meaning to stop, resist, or remain.
Its initial meaning in the 15th century was stubbornly resisting control or guidance,
obstinate in refusal,
and for some time the word was primarily applied to animals, such as horses.
Over the next few centuries,
restive gained additional closely related meanings, such as inflexible,
sluggish, and persistent, and the word often described people as well as animals.