It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 25th.
Today's word is resplendent, spelled R-E-S-P-L-E-N-D-E-N-T.
Resplendent is an adjective.
It's a literary word used to describe someone or something as very bright and attractive.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the uproar, a novel by Karim Demichke.
Her box braids were tied in a top bun that poked out of her green and gold headscarf.
Pretty as the braids were, he quietly missed the natural hair they protected.
When unbound, her hair was a resplendent halo of vitality, but he knew the halo required a complex,
labor-intensive mourning and night routine for which she had lost patience.
The word resplendent shares a root with the word splendid, meaning, among other things,
shining or brilliant, and splendent, meaning shining or glossy,
and splendor, meaning brightness or luster.
Each of these glowing terms gets its shine from the Latin verb splendere, meaning to shine.
In the case of resplendent, the prefix RE,
added to splendere, formed the Latin resplendere, meaning to shine back.
Splendent, splendor, and resplendent were first used in English during the 15th century,
but splendid didn't light up our language until almost 200 years later.
Its earliest known use dates from the early 1600s.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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