Dictionary.com chooses eleemosynary as Word of the Day
Howard Lake | 17 February 2006 | News
One of Dictionary.com’s recent Words of the Day was eleemosynary, derived from one of the earliest words to mean philanthropic or charitable.
Dictionary.com sends out a free daily email alert focusing on just one of the many thousands of words listed on its site. Its Word of the Day for Sunday 12 February 2006 was “eleemosynary”. It might not be familiar to all fundraisers, but it has the venerable distinction of being drawn from both Greek and Latin roots of a word meaning “charitable”.
Eleemosynary tends not to feature in current news on the charity sector. It certainly hasn’t appeared on UK Fundraising before, but maybe we’ll rectify that in the future. We’ll keep an eye out for it in headlines in Third Sector, Charity Times and Professional Fundraising, but we won’t hold our breath.
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According to dictionary.com, the word means “charitable” in terms of a charitable institution and of gifts given charitably, such as alms. It can also be applied to the recipients of charity e.g. “the eleemosynary poor.”
Dictionary.com describes the word’s etymology: “The source of eleemosynary is Medieval Latin eleemosynarius, from Late Latin eleemosyna, “alms,” from Greek eleemosyne, from eleemon, “pitiful,” from eleos, “pity.” According to World Wide Words, “it was introduced into English in the early part of the seventeenth century”. It now appears 178,000 times in a search using Google.
Incidentally, Dictionary.com has been very charitable with eleemosynary: they’ve accorded it Word of the Day status once before, on 14 May 2003.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.