anecdote

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 9, 2026 is: anecdote • AN-ik-doht  • noun An anecdote is a short narrative about an interesting, funny, or biographical incident. // Dinner with our uncles means lots of anecdotes involving the mischief they got into as kids. See the entry > Examples: “Standing in front of a room of about 40 people … [NASCAR driver, Lavar] Scott told stories about his racing family. ‘One time, my grandmother raced my grandfather, and she flipped her Mustang,’ said Scott. The anecdote was greeted with a chorus of laughs.” — Devin Jackson, The Orlando Sentinel, 28 June 2026 Did you know? The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote three historical works in Greek. In the first two, he dealt with wars and public works projects, but the third was different. Referred to as the Anekdota, from the Greek adjective anekdotos meaning “unpublished,” it contained bitter attacks on the emperor Justinian, his wife, and other notables of contemporary Constantinople. Understandably, it was not published until after Procopius’s death. English speakers originally used an anglicized version of the book’s name for similar secret or unpublished histories or biographies, but by the 17th century, the meaning of anecdote had been broadened to cover brief and interesting or amusing tales of events or incidents.