Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 5th.
Today's word is matriculate, spelled M-A-T-R-I-C-U-L-A-T-E.
Matriculate is a verb.
To matriculate is to enroll or be enrolled as a student, especially at a college or university.
Here's the word used.
In a sentence from Time, fresh off the heels of graduation from high school,
many rising freshmen are choosing to step off the treadmill for a year before matriculating in college.
Anybody who has had basic Latin knows that alma mater,
a fancy term for the school you attended, comes from a phrase that means fostering mother.
If mater means mother, then matriculate probably has something to do with a school nurturing you just like a mother.
Well, not exactly.
If you go back far enough, matriculate is distantly related to the Latin mater,
but its maternal associations were lost long ago, even in terms of Latin history.
It's more closely related to the late Latin word matricula, which means public role or register.
Matricula has more to do with being enrolled than being mothered,
but it is the diminutive form of the Latin noun matrix,
which in late Latin was used in the sense of list or register,
and earlier referred to female animals kept for the purposes of breeding.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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