Pronounced: NIGH-duhs, noun
Notes: I couldn’t think of the meaning, but when I saw it, it rang a bell in my memory
Yesterday’s word
The word griselda is “a meek and patient woman”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1300s
Background / Comments
When I see our word, it reminds me of the Agatha Christie book The Murder at the Vicarage, (the first Miss Marple novel) in which Griselda is name of the wife of the vicar. She appears in a kind of cameo (by which I mean a brief, incidental mention) in the book The Body in the Library and – even more briefly – The 4.50 from Paddington. Our word came from the name Griselda, who is a woman in various medieval tales – she appears in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. In the tales, she suffers without complaining as her husband puts her through various tests. The actual name Griselda comes from Germaic roots and means “gray battle-maid”.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 