Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 15, 2026 is:





mayhem • \MAY-hem\ • noun

Mayhem refers to needless or willful damage or violence, and especially to a scene or situation that involves a lot of violence. In figurative use, it may refer to any instance of excited activity.

// The director's newest thriller is brimming with murder and mayhem.

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Examples:

"The storage space is a veritable Fort Knox safe from tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and all manner of mischief and mayhem, where the 68-degree temperature and 45% humidity are ideal for preserving paper and film." — Lisa Gutierrez, The Kansas City Star, 3 Mar. 2026





Did you know?

Legally speaking, mayhem refers to the gruesome crime of deliberately causing an injury that permanently disfigures another. The word comes via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb maheimer ("to maim") and is probably of Germanic origin; the English verb maim comes from the same ancestor. The "disfigurement" sense of mayhem first appeared in English in the 15th century. Centuries later, the word came to refer to any kind of violent behavior. Nowadays, mayhem is frequently used to suggest any kind of chaos or disorder, even in far less fraught circumstances, as in "there was mayhem on the field after the winning goal was scored."

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 14, 2026 is:





enjoin • \in-JOIN\ • verb

Enjoining is about requiring or prohibiting. To enjoin a person is to direct or order them to do something. To enjoin an act or practice is to prohibit it; in legal contexts, that prohibition is by way of a judicial order.

// Our guide enjoined us to take great care as we began our journey.

// The court has enjoined the ban.

// We were enjoined from speaking on the tour.

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Examples:

“Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit Thursday ... to put a landlord accused of providing unsuitable living conditions to his renters out of business. ... The lawsuit seeks restitution for impacted tenants and to ‘enjoin the defendants from doing business in the District.’” — Gary Fields, The Associated Press, 13 Feb. 2026





Did you know?

Enjoin has the Latin verb jungere, meaning “to join,” at its root, but the kind of joining expressed by enjoin is quite particular: it is about linking someone to an action or activity by either requiring or prohibiting it. When it’s the former at hand—that is, when enjoin is used to mean “to direct or order someone to do something”—the preposition to is typically employed, as in “they enjoined us to secrecy.” When prohibition is involved, from is common, as in “attendees were enjoined from photographing the event.” In legal contexts, enjoining involves prohibition by judicial order, through means of an injunction, as in “the judge enjoined the sale of the property.”

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 13, 2026 is:





kibitzer • \KIB-it-ser\ • noun

A kibitzer is someone who watches other people and makes unwanted comments about what they are doing.

// It wasn't long after they bought their house that the couple heard from neighborhood kibitzers offering tips on landscaping and remodeling.

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Examples:

"During the chess games, the telegraph operators occasionally asked each other how many people were in the room. At times, a dozen kibitzers looked on. At others, only the rotating cast of chess players and telegraph operators was present." — Greg Uyeno, IEEE Spectrum, 11 Dec. 2025





Did you know?

The Yiddish language has given English some particularly piquant terms over the years, and kibitzer (or kibbitzer) is one such word. Kibitzer came into English—by way of the Yiddish kibitser—from the German word kiebitzen, meaning "to look on (at a card game)." (Like its ancestor, kibitzer was originally, and sometimes still is, applied to vocal observers of cards as well as other games.) Although kibitzer usually implies the imparting of unwanted advice, there is a respectable body of evidence for a kibitzer as a person simply making comments or even just shooting the breeze.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 12, 2026 is:





recondite • \REK-un-dyte\ • adjective

Recondite is a formal word used to describe something that is difficult to understand or that is not known by many people.

// The text addresses a technical subject using recondite vocabulary, which makes it very difficult to read.

// The candy has the perfect balance of sweet and tart, but what delights me most are the recondite facts printed inside the wrapper.

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Examples:

“Each medical school has variations in its prerequisites, but all require a strong foundation in the sciences. This includes courses such as the notoriously recondite organic chemistry as well as biology, general chemistry, and physics.” — Richard Menger, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2025





Did you know?

Recondite is one of those underused but useful words that’s always a boon to one’s vocabulary. Though it describes something difficult to understand, there is nothing recondite about the word’s history. It dates to the early 1600s, when it was coined from the Latin word reconditus, the past participle of recondere, “to conceal.” (“Concealed” is also a meaning of recondite, albeit an obscure one today.) Remove the re- of recondite and you get something even more obscure: condite, an obsolete verb meaning both “to pickle or preserve” and “to embalm.” Add the prefix in- to that quirky charmer and we get incondite, which means “badly put together,” as in “incondite prose.” All three words have the Latin word condere at their root; that verb is translated variously as “to put or bring together” and “to put up or store”—as in, perhaps, some pickles or preserves.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 11, 2026 is:





subterfuge • \SUB-ter-fyooj\ • noun

Subterfuge is a formal word that refers to the use of tricks to hide, avoid, or get something.

// They obtained the documents by subterfuge.

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Examples:

“Despite her difficult childhood, Mavis [Gallant] persevered, through grit, bloody-mindedness, an absence of self-pity, and an ironic sense of humor. Lunch with her was always hilarious and often horrifying: the tales she told about her life exceeded in unlikely gruesomeness even her own fiction. She certainly had the ‘cold eye’ that Yeats recommended for writers, and she saw through subterfuge, no matter who was trying it on.” — Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2025





Did you know?

Though subterfuge is a synonym of deception, fraud, double-dealing, and trickery, there’s nothing tricky about the word’s etymology. English borrowed the word with its meaning from the Late Latin noun subterfugium, which in turn comes from the Latin verb subterfugere, meaning “to escape, evade.” That word combines the prefix subter-, meaning “secretly” (from the adverb subter, meaning “underneath”) with the verb fugere, which means “to flee” and which is also the source of words such as fugitive and refuge, among others.