Word of the Day : February 6, 2018

logomachy \loh-GAH-muh-kee\ noun

Definition

1 : a dispute over or about words

2 : a controversy marked by verbiage

Did You Know?

It doesn't take much to start people arguing about words, but there's no quarrel about the origin of logomachy. It comes from the Greek roots logos, meaning "word" or "speech," and machesthai, meaning "to fight," and it entered English in the mid-1500s. If you're a word enthusiast, you probably know that logos is the root of many English words (monologue, neologism, logic, and most words ending in -logy, for example), but what about other derivatives of machesthai? Actually, this is a tough one even for word whizzes. Only a few very rare English words come from machesthai. Here are two of them: heresimach ("an active opponent of heresy and heretics") and naumachia ("an ancient Roman spectacle representing a naval battle").

Learn a new word every day, delivered to your inbox!

Test Your Vocabulary



  Words of Snow and Ice Quiz






    Which of the following refers to thin, bending ice, or to the act of running over such ice?




                                  kittly-benders
                                  pince-nez
                                  spindrift
                                  duvet







    Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words?
    TAKE THE QUIZ





    Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.
    TAKE THE QUIZ

Aired February 6, 2018

All Merriam-Webster content is available at www.merriam-webster.com