Word of the Day

: March 6, 2025

career

verb kuh-REER

What It Means

To career is to go at top speed especially in a headlong manner.

// The tourists gripped their seats and exchanged anxious looks as the bus careered along the narrow roads.

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career in Context

“This winter, I attended a livestock auction on California’s remote northern coast. Ranchers sat on plywood bleachers warming their hands as the auctioneer mumble-chanted and handlers flushed cows into a viewing paddock one by one. Most of the cows were hale animals, careering in and cantering out.” — Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, 12 Apr. 2024

Did You Know?

If you’re already familiar with career’s equestrian history, surely you joust. The noun career dates to the early 16th century, when it referred to the speed of something moving along a particular course. To go “in full career” or “at full career” was to hurtle, barrel, blaze, or zip, a meaning employed by Sir Walter Scott in a jousting scene in his historical romance Ivanhoe: “The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career.” The verb career thus originally conveyed the action of a horse or rider making a short gallop or charge, as when the very aptly named John Speed wrote in his 1611 Historie of Great Britain “his horse of a fierce courage carrierd [=careered] as he went.” It later gained additional senses applied to the movement of horses, such as “to prance or caracole” (“to turn to one side and another in running”), as well as one—“to rush forward quickly and recklessly”—that can be applied to anything or anyone feeling their oats, velocity-wise.