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Feb 4, 2016
This week’s theme
Four-letter words

This week’s words
yerk
unco
saga
diel
alar

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

diel

PRONUNCIATION:
(DY-uhl, deel)

MEANING:
noun: A period of 24 hours.
adjective: Lasting 24 hours or having a 24-hour period.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin dies (day), which also gave us adjourn, diary, diet, circadian, journal, journey, quotidian, and sojourn. Earliest documented use: 1934.

USAGE:
“Composition of fishing labour, sites worked, gear used, and target species all vary during the diel cycle. For example, in American Samoa both men and women fish by day, but night-time fishing is primarily a male task.”
Nicholas V.C. Polunin and Callum M. Roberts; Reef Fisheries; Springer; 1996.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The mark of the educated man is not in his boast that he has built his mountain of facts and stood on the top of it, but in his admission that there may be other peaks in the same range with men on the top of them, and that, though their views of the landscape may be different from his, they are nonetheless legitimate. -E.J. Pratt, poet (4 Feb 1882-1964)

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