Pronounced: vuh-RAY-shuss, adj
Notes: No, this is not voracious misspelled!
Yesterday’s word
The word louche means “shifty; disreputable; shady; sketchy”
First usage
Our word came into English in the early 1800s
Background / Comments
My theory (by which I mean that I reasoned this out without reading about this elsewhere; it may be that many others have reached the same or a similar conclusion before I did) is that because our word is not well known, when a person (who doesn’t know our word) heard another person (using our word) to describe a third disreputable person as “living louchely”, the first person heard “loosely”; thus giving us “loose living” or “loose morals” which should have really been “louche living” or “louche morals”. It’s a thought. The origin of our word is interesting: it comes from the French word louche (cross-eyed), which came from the Old French word losche, the feminine form of lois, which comes from the Latin word luscus (blind in one eye).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 