When I first subscribed to Merriam-Webster World Wide Web “Word of the Day” I didn’t know what this entailed.  Some of the words I can’t even pronounce and then there were others you wouldn’t even think would be on there.  My first thoughts about this site was, “Oh My God” they are going to give words a mile long.  Then after a few days of reviewing the words it became quite clear that this was going to be interesting.  I was actually waiting to see if I could recognize the next word or even if I had heard of it.  Here are a few of the words that I have been receiving.
     EPONYMOUS  /ih-Pah-nuh-muss or eh-PAH-nuh-muss/.  This word is: “an adjective relating to, or being one for whom something is named or is believed to be named.”  The example sentence that they gave was: “ There are a large number of eponymous diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.” Eponymous comes to us from the Greek adjective “eponymos”, which in turn is borrowed from “Onyma.”  A number of English words have borrowed “Onyma.”  For instance, “synonymous”, and also “anonymous.”  Onyma means “name” therefore Onyma was borrowed into the English Language and is a lexical word that can function alone or has meaning by itself.
     My next word was one that I would not have thought to be word of the day.  YAHOO /YAY-hoo or YAH-hoo/.  Yahoo is a noun meaning “a boorish, crass, or stupid person.”  Jonathan Swift made-up the word Yahoo in his book titled “Gulliver’s Travels” which was published in 1726.  This was the birth of the word Yahoo.  I thought this word to be very interesting when I read its origin even though it is not a compound, blend or any of the lexemes.  We often pick up on words we like and borrow them into our own vocabulary.  We could however say that we borrowed this word from Jonathan Swift and his book.
     Another word was Fortuitous /for-TOO-uh-tuss or for-TYOO-uh-tuss/ which is an adjective.  Fortuitous means “occurring by chance, fortunate, lucky coming or happening by a lucky chance.”  For 250 years “fortuitous: had only one meaning:  “occurring by chance.”  After the middle part of the 20th Century it took on another meaning “fortunate.” Merriam-Webster seems to think “Perhaps the seeds of the newer sense were planted by earlier writers applying overtones of good fortune to something that is a chance occurrence.”  Even today we apply “Fortuitous to something that has happened by chance but has a favorable result.
     Word of the Day has been a very interesting activity. I could have written many pages for this essay.  Every word no matter how hard to pronounce or easy has been fascinating to read about.  Your first glimpse of the word does not always turn out to be what the actually meaning is.
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
     Merriam-Webster’s .Com Word Of The Day
      Eponymous Word of the Day on 9/11/01
      Yahoo Word of the Day on 9/13/01
      Fortuitous Word of the Day on 9/14/01