apex

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 27, 2010 is: apex • \AY-peks\ • noun : the highest point : peak Examples: Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first people to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest, reached the apex of the great mountain at 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953. Did you know? "Apex" entered English from Latin, where it originally meant "a small rod at the top of a flamen's cap." What's a flamen's cap? Flamens were priests who devoted themselves to serving just one of the many ancient Roman gods (for instance, just Jupiter or Mars). Those priests wore distinctive conical caps that English speakers dubbed "flamen's caps." Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatist Ben Jonson was one of the few English writers known to have used "apex" in its flamen's-cap sense: "Upon his head a hat of delicate wool, whose top ended in a cone, and was thence called apex." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.