It's the Word of the Day for March 7th.
Today's word is Libertine, spelled L-I-B-E-R-T-I-N-E.
Libertine is a noun.
Libertine is, in broad terms, a person who is unrestrained by convention or morality.
More narrowly, the word describes someone who leads an immoral life.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the ledger of Lakeland, Florida.
As horrifying as some of the sins of Victorian scholarship may have been,
it would have been anathema to these students of classical philosophy to simply throw out Plato.
But that's what some of their modern inheritors have tried to do.
It's worth noting that we might not have Plato's work at all were it not carefully studied and preserved by the Islamic scholars,
hardly libertines themselves, of the medieval period.
I only ask to be free, says Mr.
Skimpole in Dickens's Bleak House.
His words would undoubtedly have appealed to the world's first libertines.
The word libertine comes from the Latin libertinus,
a word used in early writings of Roman antiquity to describe a formerly enslaved person who had been set free.
The Roman term for an emancipated person was the Latin word libertus.
Middle English speakers used the word libertine to refer to a freedman.
But by the late 1500s, its meaning was extended to freethinkers, both religious and secular,
and it later came to imply that an individual was a little too unrestrained,