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Feb 5, 2016
This week’s theme
Four-letter words

This week’s words
yerk
unco
saga
diel
alar

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Eponyms
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

alar

PRONUNCIATION:
(AY-luhr)

MEANING:
adjective: 1. Relating to wings; wing-shaped. 2. Relating to the armpit.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ala (wing), which also gave us aisle and aileron. Earliest documented use: 1791.

USAGE:
“Fred Urquhart began in 1937 to experiment with different ways of marking these delicate insects in order to study their migration patterns, eventually developing and refining the method of applying an alar tag to the monarch’s wing.”
Gerry Rising; A Salute to the King of the Monarch Butterflies; Buffalo News (New York); Dec 16, 1996.

See more usage examples of alar in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning. -Adlai Stevenson, governor, ambassador (5 Feb 1900-1965)

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