It's the word of the day for October 25th.
Today's word is reek, spelled W-R-E-A-K.
Reek is a verb.
It means to cause something very harmful or damaging.
It's often used with on or upon.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Hollywood Reporter.
Ours is a geography of cataclysm.
Santa Anna's reek their psychic wrath.
The odor of disaster seeps from the street like that sulfurous egg smell of the La Brea Tar Pits.
In its early days, the word reek was synonymous with the word avenge,
a meaning exemplified when Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus proclaims,
We will solicit heaven and move the gods to send down justice for to wreak our wrongs.
This sense is now archaic, but the association hasn't been lost.
Although wreak is today most often paired with havoc,
it's also still sometimes paired with words like vengeance and destruction.
We humbly suggest you avoid wreaking any of that, however,
no matter how badly you may crave your just desserts.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.