I've been wanting to blog about this for a while, but now I finally have an opportunity... The Word of the Month is a word I learn during a particular month that I find highly interesting, either in meaning or just how the word sounds. I also have to come upon it by chance. Though there isn't one every month...

And this month there is: asterism! An asterism is a small group of stars, which can be a constellation or just a part of one – for instance, the Big Dipper is an asterism within the constellation Ursa Major. How cool is that?

Past words of the month:

Antepenultimate, third-to-last (March '06)

Sesquipedalian, using long words (April '06)

Hirsute, hairy (July '06)

Apocryphal, generally assumed to be factual but not known for certain (I think October '06, might have been September)

Bibliothecary, a librarian (December '06)

Asterism, a small group of stars (January '07)

In other news, Bio and English weren't hard yesterday, and today Latin and French were almost easy. I found the sight translation on the Latin exam most entertaining, as it was the only challenging part of the exam – I didn't know the meaning of coactus est (though I regognized that it was a form of coegi) and potior on an earlier part, but it was nevertheless quite fun.

If you couldn't tell, I'm quite fond of obscure words. Whee!

~ ToM