Word of the Day

: February 15, 2024

enervate

verb EN-er-vayt

What It Means

Enervate is a formal word used for situations in which someone or something is being sapped of physical or mental vigor, vitality, or strength. The verb is most common in the participial forms enervated and enervating, as in "children enervated by the summer afternoon heat" and "a tedious discussion we found completely enervating."

// The person giving the lengthy toast seemed to be completely unaware of the degree to which he was enervating his audience.

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enervate in Context

"Toward the end of Paved Paradise … [author, Henry] Grabar follows housing activists' efforts to legalize in-law apartments carved from single-family houses, in many cases from the garage. The mere fact of this movement epitomizes the underlying problem: Local regulations have blocked apartments while allowing parking structures because, for most of seven or eight decades, city planners got hung up on the wrong issue. The visionaries of Victor Gruen's day simply failed to foresee how the relentless promotion of parking spaces might enervate cities and crowd out other needs." — Dante Ramos, The Atlantic, 4 June 2023

Did You Know?

Do not let any haziness in your understanding of enervate cause you to be enervated. Confusion about this somewhat rare word is reasonable, and aided greatly by the fact that although enervate looks like a plausible product of the joining of energize and invigorate, it is actually an antonym of both. Enervate comes from a form of the Latin verb enervare, which literally means "to remove the sinews of," and figuratively means simply "to weaken." Enervare was formed from the prefix e-, meaning "out of," and nervus, meaning "sinew, nerve." So etymologically, at least, someone who is enervated is "out of nerve." Knowing this, you no longer need be unnerved by it.