Pronounced: YAHR-bur-oh (alt: YAHR-bur-uh), noun
Notes: I didn’t know this word, but some of you may
Yesterday’s word
The word scarify means
- to make scratches of small cuts in (something, like skin, a road surface, or the wall of a seed)
- to lacerate the feelings of
First usage
Our word came into English in the first half of the 1400s
Background / Comments
Our word came from the Middle English word scarifien, which came from the Middle French word scarifier, which came from the Late Latin word scarificare, which is an alteration of the Latin scariphare (scratch; to make scratches), which came from the Greek word skariphasthai (to sketch), which is a derivative of skariphos (stylus). Although I said yesterday that our word is not related to “scare”, it turns out that in the late 1700s, a homograph (scarify) was created by combing “scare” with “terrify”, so there is a meaning that DOES relate to “scare” — it means “to scare; to frighten”.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 