Beginning #65: new words

I decided to begin my month-long educational adventure of learning a new word every day beginning November 1, 2011. And as you all know, that's today. At least it's still today in Eastern Standard Time.

To help facilitate this desired increase in my lexicon, I signed up for dictionary.com's Word of the Day e-mails over the weekend and looked forward to my first official Word of the Day. I awoke this morning, picked up my phone with excitement, opened my mail, and saw the following message:

AIOLI?!?! That's my first word? Now, I realize that everyone may not know what "aioli" means, but I love an aioli. LOVE. I would eat with beef. I would eat it with french fries. Heck, I would eat it with a spoon.

Not wanting to admit defeat so early in this quest, I decided to harness the power of google and search for a different word of the day. Once again, I was disappointed...

Merriam-Webster's word: Cerulean
wordthink.com's word: Expeditious
wordsmith.org's word: Pinstriped
NY Times' word: Evocative
quotationspage.com's word: Aria

I even checked SuperKids.com's Vocabulary Builder to no avail (Dividend).

I was ready to give up when I stumbled upon a website - I can't even find the exact one now - with the following word: "Lilt." I've heard it before, but didn't really know the definition. In most usages, it means "a light, happy song," and considering how much I love coming up with my own lilts on a daily basis, I thought that having this word as my very FIRST word was very à propos.

I decided to join a few more list serves to increase the likelihood of finding a new word everyday, despite my disdain for having too much junk mail. Considering how long it took me to find a word today, I think it will be worth it.

I probably won't write any more full blog entries on this task, at least not until it's all over. But for those of you interested in increasing your vocabulary along with mine, I will be posting every day's word here, along with the approximate time and subject of the sentence in which I use it. My fourth grade reading teacher, Mrs. Figueroa, would be so proud!