Word of the Day

: December 10, 2007

imprecate

verb IM-prih-kayt

What It Means

: to invoke evil on : curse

imprecate in Context

"The workers' sweating brows wrinkled, but I heard no one imprecate the river; each just went back to passing along stories and sandbags." (William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse)

Did You Know?

It may surprise you to learn that a word that refers to wishing evil upon someone has its roots in praying, but "imprecate" ultimately derives from the Latin verb "precari," meaning "to pray, ask, or entreat." "Precari" is also the ancestor of such English words as "deprecate" (which once meant "to pray against an evil," though that sense is now archaic), "precatory" ("expressing a wish") and even "pray" itself (which has deeper roots in the Latin noun for a request or entreaty, "prex").