It's the word of the day for January 5th.
Today's word is marginalia, spelled M-A-R-G-I-N-A-L-I-A.
Marginalia is a noun.
It's a plural noun that refers to notes or other marks written in the margins of a text,
and also to non-essential matters or items.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Scientific American.
Marginalia have a long history.
Leonardo da Vinci famously scribbled thoughts about gravity years before Galileo Galilei published his magnum opus on the subject.
The discovery was waiting under our noses in the margins of Leonardo's codex arundel.
In the introduction to his essay titled Marginalia, Edgar Allan Poe wrote,
In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin.
This not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable,
as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts,
agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.
At the time the essay was first published in 1844, marginalia was only a few decades old,
despite describing something, notes in the margin of a text, that had existed for centuries.
An older word, apostle, refers to a single annotation made in a margin,
but that word is rarely used today.
Even if you are not like Poe, simply ravenous for scribbling in your own books,
you likely know marginalia as a telltale sign that someone has read a particular volume before you.