Pronounced: ih-VIS-uh-rate, verb
Notes: I kind of knew this word
Yesterday’s word
The word balletoname is “a devotee of ballet”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1930s
Background / Comments
Because the word’s pronunciation begins “bah-LEH-tuh” and not “bahl-AYE”, I didn’t think of it being related to the ballet. I had guessed it might be related to “ballot”, but that was wrong. If you ignored the pronunciation and saw “ballet” and “mania” in our word, you’d be pretty close. The pronunciation is probably due the fact that our word came from the Russian word baletoman, which is a combination of balet (ballet) and -man — from maniya (mania). Oddly enough, neither “ballet” or “mania” came from Russian; “ballet” came from French, and into French from the Italian word balleto. The word “mania” came from Latin, which came from Greek. One more oddity about our word is the ending: most words for “lover of” use the suffix “-phile”.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 