natant

Pronounced: NAYT-nt, adj

Notes: I thought I knew the definition, but when I looked it up, I was wrong

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Yesterday’s word

The word pabulum means

• material for intellectual nourishment
• something that nourishes an animal or plant organism; food; nutrients

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-to-late 1800s

Background / Comments

I confused our word with “pablum”, which rather means the opposite of our word: it is the brand name (Pablum) of a soft, bland cereal for infants, and the lower-case word came to mean anything simplistic or naive. I suspect that the brand name was taken from our word, which comes from the Latin word pābulum (food; nourishment), which comes from the verb pāscere (to feed) combined with the noun ending -bulum.