A.Word.A.Day --venust

A.Word.A.Day

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Oct 12, 2026

This week’s theme
Words that look like misspellings

This week’s words
venust

Venus and Cupid, c. 1520s
Venus is venust; Cupid aims to please, showering her with affection.

Art: Lorenzo Lotto

Previous week’s theme
A change of character

Wordsmith Games

🧩	Jigsaw Riddle The Ledger Rides Again
🌍	Langitude Trace Charleston home

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Just imagine the most extravagant version of the multiverse: infinitely many universes, one for every possibility.

Unaided human flight? Done.

Leaders who aren’t corrupt, mendacious, or vain? Visa applications, please!

Surely, somewhere, airports don’t funnel arriving passengers through a gauntlet of duty-free shops. Now that’s our idea of duty-free.

If every possibility gets a universe, there must be one in which every apparent misspelling is perfectly correct.

Enter the wordiverse. This week, we’re bringing five of that realm’s inhabitants into ours. They may look wrong, but they’re all right: each is a bona fide English word. Spellcheck may protest, but the dictionary has the final word.

venust

PRONUNCIATION:

(vuh-NUHST)

MEANING:

adjective: Beautiful, graceful, elegant.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin venustus (charming, beautiful), related to venus (love, charm) and to Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Earliest documented use: 1513.

NOTES:

Venust may look as if Venus has picked up a stray t, but the extra letter has done nothing to diminish her beauty.

USAGE:

“I would have you remain
in just such venust eloquence.”
T. Harri Jones; The Complete Poems of T.H. Jones, 1921-1965; University of Wales Press; 2008.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I stay in love with movement. -Dorothy Livesay, poet (12 Oct 1909-1996)

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