catercorner

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 12, 2026 is: catercorner • \KAT-ee-kor-ner\  • adverb or adjective Catercorner is used to describe two things that are located across from each other on opposite corners. It is a less common variant of kitty-corner. // The store is catercorner from the park, making it the perfect location to grab snacks for our picnic. See the entry > Examples: “Positioned on balconies catercorner from each other, Tom Brady completed a pass across Bourbon Street to Rob Gronkowski, proving they’ve still got it. Gronk promptly spiked the football on the fan-filled street below.” — Rebecca Cohen and Greg Rosenstein, NBC News, 9 Feb. 2025 Did you know? Catercorner gets its first element from the Middle French noun quatre, meaning “four,” which English speakers modified to cater and applied to the four-dotted side of a die—a side important in several winning combinations in dice games. Perhaps because the four spots on a die can suggest an X, cater eventually came to be used dialectically as a verb meaning “to place, move, or cut across diagonally”; cater was later combined with corner to form catercorner to describe things positioned diagonally from each other. (In one early usage from an 1825 magazine article, the author marvels at an “ancient Roman fresco painting, in which a luxurious table is represented as groaning under (among other choice dishes …) four peacocks, with their tails set, cater-corner!”) Eventually the variants kitty-corner and catty-corner, which are now the more common forms, developed. Despite all appearances, these terms bear no etymological relation to our feline friends.