Pronounced: VOH-tuh-ree, noun/adj
Notes: Nothing to do with voting (which is what I thought)
Yesterday’s word
The word clerihew is “a light verse quatrain rhyming a-a-b-b and usually dealing with a person named in the initial line”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1920s
Background / Comments
I don’t have any memory of having run across any clerihews. Our word came from a book called Biography for Beginners by E Clerihew (whose real name was Edmund Clerihew Bentley). The book was a collection of humorous four-line verses about famous people, that he claimed he started as a bored high school student. The readers of the book began to call such verses clerihews, and it stuck. Here’s one from his book: Sir Humphrey Davy / Abominated gray. / He lived in the odium / Of having discovered Sodium.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 