Word of the Day

: July 12, 2021

emprise

noun em-PRYZE

What It Means

: an adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise

emprise in Context

"But perhaps he was the only one courageous enough to voice an opinion that others might have shared, but were afraid to say, that this whole quixotic emprise had been a bad idea, that they had been fools to attempt an escape." — John D. Lukacs, Escape From Davao, 2010

"Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary." — Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Did You Know?

Someone who engages in emprises undertakes much, and the word became established in English with the chivalrous undertakings of brave knights. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer used emprise to describe one such knight in "The Franklin's Tale" (one of the stories in The Canterbury Tales): "There was a knight that loved and went through pains / To serve a lady in his best way; / And many a labor, many a great emprise, / He wrought for his lady before she was won."