Word of the Day

: April 29, 2021

amicable

adjective AM-ih-kuh-bul

What It Means

: characterized by friendly goodwill : peaceable

amicable in Context

"Those two weeks in the high country passed with the most amicable feeling between us, and it was not until the last day that Layton showed the unpleasant side of his personality that we all knew existed." — Shannon Burke, Into the Savage Country, 2015

"While neither Kardashian nor West has talked publicly about the split, a source told Us following the filing that their separation was amicable and they both knew it was coming." — Sophia Vilensky, Us Weekly, 4 Mar. 2021

Did You Know?

Amicable showed up in the English language in the 15th century, ushered in by writers who had such a love of Latin that they were using a literary form of the language, now called Late Latin, when all the other Latin speakers were using Vulgar Latin, that is the nonliterary Latin that eventually developed into the Romance languages. The Late Latin root of amicable is amīcābilis, meaning "friendly," and when amicable was introduced to English it was moving into semantic territory that friendly had occupied for some 400 years. But English has always been magnanimous about accepting newcomers. As is so often the case with Latin-derived synonyms, the new word became the more formal term—it's most often used to describe agreements and relationships—while the old tried-and-true word retained its broad use.