exhort

<font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica"> <p> <strong> <font color="#000066">Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 21, 2020 is:</font> </strong> </p> <p> <strong>exhort</strong> &#149; \ig-ZORT\&nbsp; &#149; <em>verb</em><br /> <p><strong>1 :</strong> to incite by argument or advice <strong>:</strong> urge strongly</p> <p><strong>2 :</strong> to give warnings or advice <strong>:</strong> make urgent appeals</p> </p> <p> <strong>Examples:</strong><br /> <p>"You'd think it was easy, making a little cube with dots, but it's hard to make a die that isn't biased. The foreman would walk up and down <em>exhorting</em> us: 'The fate of honest men and women lies in your hands. A single crooked die can ruin a man for life.'" — <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=mW-9JvFfuywC&amp;pg=PT184#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">Margot Livesey, <em>Banishing Verona</em>, 2004</a></p> <p>"Teen-age activist Greta Thunberg told world political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday that their inaction on the climate crisis was 'fueling the flames by the hour.' The 17-year-old <em>exhorted</em> the World Economic Forum audience to 'act as if you loved your children above all else.'" — <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/our-house-is-still-on-fire-greta-thunberg-tells-davos.html">Vicky McKeever, <em>CNBC.com</em>, 23 Jan. 2020</a></p> </p> <p> <strong>Did you know?</strong><br /> <p><em>Exhort</em> is a 15th-century coinage. It derives from the Latin verb <em>hortari</em>, meaning "to incite," and it often implies the ardent urging or admonishing of an orator or preacher. English speakers apparently took to the root <em>hort</em>, fiddling around with different prefixes to create other words similar in meaning to <em>exhort</em>. They came up with <em><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adhort">adhort</a></em> (meaning the same as <em>exhort</em>) and <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dehort"><em>dehort</em></a>