It's the Word of the Day podcast for January 30th.
Today's word is preeminent, spelled P-R-E-E-M-I-N-E-N-T.
Preeminent is an adjective.
It's a formal word used to describe someone or something more important,
skillful, or successful than their counterparts or peers.
It's used synonymously with the words outstanding and supreme.
Here's the word used in a sentence from foreign affairs.
In this warmly engaging intellectual biography, Viotti traces the life and ideas of Kenneth Waltz,
a preeminent figure in post-World War II international relations scholarship.
What is noteworthy about the following sentence?
Mount Kilimanjaro is a prominent eminence on the Tanzanian landscape.
You very likely recognized two words that are closely related to preeminent, prominent and eminence.
All three words are rooted to the Latin verb stem minere,
which is taken to mean to stand out, though there is no record of its use without a prefix.
Mount also deserves an honorable mention.
It comes from the Latin mont or moss, meaning mountain,
which is understood to share a common ancestor with minere.
Mount leads us in turn to paramount, a word closely related in meaning to preeminent.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.