A.Word.A.Day --temerity

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Aug 1, 2025

This week’s theme
Misc words

This week’s words
vicissitude
trenchant
untrammeled
pillory
temerity

The Fall of Icarus (1635-1637)

Art: Jacob Peter Gowy, after Peter Paul Rubens

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AWADmail 1205

Next week’s theme
Lewis Carroll

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

temerity

PRONUNCIATION:

(tuh-MER-i-tee)

MEANING:

noun: Excessive or reckless boldness.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin temere (blindly, rashly). Ultimately from the Indo-European root temh-es- (darkness), which also gave us Sanskrit tamas (darkness), German Dämmerung (twilight), and gotterdammerung. Earliest documented use: 1475. The adjectival form is temerarious.

USAGE:

“I, and others like me, now find ourselves regularly being pilloried for having the temerity to express an opinion about things.”
Karl du Fresne; Male, Pale, But Not Stale; Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand); May 31, 2018.

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

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. -Herman Melville, novelist and poet (1 Aug 1819-1891)

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