Pronounced: suh-LEP-suhs
Notes: I have posted a similar word before
Yesterday’s word
The word topsy is “something growing without intention or direction”
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1800s
Background / Comments
Quite a coincidence: I’m sure I’ve never run across our word, but the day after I wrote the entry for it, I was reading something and ran across our word. Any,way our word came from a character in a book: specifically, Topsy, a young slave girl in the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (by Harriet Beecher Stowe). I’ve never read that book — if you have, you might have known our word (or at least the character). She had a cute reply when she was asked who made her, and it became popular and thus became a word in English for unplanned growth.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 