divagate

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 3, 2008 is: divagate • \DYE-vuh-gayt\ • verb : to wander or stray from a course or subject : diverge, digress Examples: The novel divagates and meanders through a labyrinth of subplots and asides. Did you know? "Divagate" hasn't wandered far in meaning from its Latin ancestors. It descends from the verb "divagari," which comes from "dis-," meaning "apart," and "vagari," meaning "to wander." "Vagari" also gave us "vagabond," meaning "a wanderer with no home," and "extravagant," an early, now archaic, sense of which was "wandering away." Latin "vagari" is also probably the source of our noun "vagary," which now usually means "whim or caprice" but originally meant "journey, excursion, or tour." Even the verb "stray" may have evolved from "vagari," by way of Vulgar Latin and Middle French. Today, "divagate" can suggest a wandering or straying that is literal (as in "the hikers divagated from the trail"), but it is more often used figuratively (as in "she tends to divagate from the subject"). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.