It's the word of the day for December 17th.
Today's word is espouse, spelled E-S-P-O-U-S-E.
Espouse is a verb.
To espouse an ideology or belief is to take it up and support it as a cause.
Espouse is usually encountered in formal speech and writing.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Pitchfork.
Crammed into a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, they, Yoko Ono and John Lennon,
immersed themselves in the city's counterculture,
absorbing progressive politics whenever they weren't glued to the television set.
Lennon's celebrity secured the duo a large platform to espouse these ideas.
As you might guess, the words espouse and spouse are hitched,
both coming from the Latin verb spondere, meaning to promise or to betroth.
In fact, the two were once completely interchangeable, with each serving as a noun,
meaning a newly married person or a partner in marriage, and also as a verb, meaning to marry.
Their semantic separation began when the noun espouse fell out of use.
Nowadays,
espouse is almost exclusively encountered as a verb used in the figuratively extended sense to commit to and support as a cause.