Pronounced: WHY-vuhrn, noun
Notes: I recognized the word, but could not properly define it
Yesterday’s word
The word Goldilocks means “just right; a happy medium; optimum; not at either extreme”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1940s
Background / Comments
As you might express, our word comes from the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. If you remember, she visits a bear’s house and tries the chairs, beds, and porridge belonging to the Papa Bear, the Mama Bear, and the Baby Bear. She discovered that the chair, bed, and porridge belonging to Baby Bear was “just right”. The story was first published in the mid-1800s. Our word is used in astronomy: the “Goldilocks zone” is the area of space whose distance from the local star is “just right” for a planet to support life. (Goldilocks is not limited to astronomy; one could have, for example, a Goldilocks bat or racket: neither to light to be ineffective nor too heavy to use well).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 