Word of the Day

: December 14, 2023

genial

adjective JEEN-yul

What It Means

Someone described as genial is cheerful and pleasant; a thing described as genial suggests or expresses friendliness and cheer.

// Omar was a most genial host, making sure to spend time with each and every one of the guests at the reception.

// Though I knew no one at the conference, the genial atmosphere immediately put me at ease.

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genial in Context

“There’s a fresh way to revisit [John] Prine apart from the catalog of records he left behind. Five decades’ worth of stories about and conversations with the artist have been collected by Holly Gleason in ‘Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters With John Prine’.... To know him is to love him, and to love and know Prine is to spend a lot of hours in his presence via Gleason’s essential compendium, which finds his observational candor, fierce intelligence and genial warmth to be unwavering over a half-century of meeting the press.” — Chris Willman, Variety, 10 Oct. 2023

Did You Know?

Warm, cheerful, and pleasant? That’s genial in a bottle, baby. Or at least (if such a declaration rubs you the wrong way) that’s the most common sense of genial. You may also be familiar with its closely related meaning of “favorable to growth or comfort” as in “what a girl wants most on vacation is to recline in the genial sunshine.” Or perhaps you’ve heard genial used to describe someone or something displaying or marked by genius, as in “who among us doesn’t appreciate genial insights embedded in a beautiful pop song”? After all, both genial and genius share an ancestor in the Latin word genius, meaning “a person’s disposition or inclination.” There are also older, now-obsolete senses of genial. When it first entered English from the Latin adjective genialis (“connected with marriage”) it shared that word’s matrimonial meaning. And at one time genial was also a synonym of native or inborn, describing things (such as musical talent) present or seemingly present in someone from birth.