Word of the Day

: August 4, 2016

edify

verb ED-uh-fye

What It Means

: to instruct and improve especially in moral and religious knowledge : uplift; also : enlighten, inform

edify in Context

"Reading Lawrence, I am amazed and edified by the raw emotional intensity of his characters. I’m looking for ways to internalize this rich, untamed emotion and try to impart something of it to the characters who come to life in my keyboard." — A. B. Yehoshua, quoted in The New York Times Book Review, 16 June 2016

"He said he hopes the group takes away the community they began to build, so they can unify and edify each other to do the work of recovery." — Taylor Stuck, The Herald-Dispatch (Huntington, West Virginia), 15 May 2016

Did You Know?

The Latin noun aedes, meaning "house" or "temple," is the root of aedificare, a verb meaning "to erect a house." Generations of speakers built on that meaning, and by the Late Latin period, the verb had gained the figurative sense of "to instruct or improve spiritually." The word eventually passed through Anglo-French before Middle English speakers adopted it as edify during the 14th century. Two of its early meanings, "to build" and "to establish," are now considered archaic; the only current sense of edify is essentially the same as that figurative meaning in Late Latin, "to instruct and improve in moral and religious knowledge."