Pronounced: an-toe-no-MAY-zhuh, noun
Notes: This sounds like some kind of disease, but many of us have used what this word means
Yesterday’s word
The word yahoo is “a boorish, crass, or stupid person”
First usage
Our word came into English in the mid-1700s
Background / Comments
If you knew our word, it’s probably because you know of its origin: It comes from Gulliver’s Travels (by Jonathan Swift), which was published in 1726. The Yahoos were a people Gulliver encountered on his fourth (and final) voyage and were a man-like race of brutes with plenty of human vices. So the word came into English to mean any particular human who was particularly unpleasant or unintelligent. I suspect that there is no connection to the search engine.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 