It's the Word of the Day podcast for August 14th.
Today's word is vacuous, spelled V-A-C-U-O-U-S.
Vacuous is an adjective.
It's a formal word indicating a lack of thought, intelligence, or substance.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Observer.
Harper Lee was not slight, was not vacuous.
To kill a mockingbird is an artifact of its time,
but it had its place in moving the arc of history and still does.
As you might have guessed, the word vacuous shares the same root as the word vacuum.
Both come from the Latin adjective vacuus, meaning empty.
This root also gave us the noun vacuity, the oldest meaning of which is an empty space,
as well as the verb evacuate, originally meaning to empty of contents.
Its predecessor, the verb vacare, is also an ancestor of the words vacation, vacancy, and even void.
All of these words suggest an emptiness of space or else a fleeing of people or things from one place to another.
Vacuous appeared in English in the middle of the 1600s, at first literally describing something that was empty.
Centuries later, it acquired its figurative usage, describing one who is lacking any substance of the mind.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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