imprecate

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 10, 2007 is: imprecate • \IM-prih-kayt\ • verb : to invoke evil on : curse Examples: "The workers' sweating brows wrinkled, but I heard no one imprecate the river; each just went back to passing along stories and sandbags." (William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse) Did you know? It may surprise you to learn that a word that refers to wishing evil upon someone has its roots in praying, but "imprecate" ultimately derives from the Latin verb "precari," meaning "to pray, ask, or entreat." "Precari" is also the ancestor of such English words as "deprecate" (which once meant "to pray against an evil," though that sense is now archaic), "precatory" ("expressing a wish") and even "pray" itself (which has deeper roots in the Latin noun for a request or entreaty, "prex"). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.