Word of the Day

: May 18, 2019

tenacious

adjective tuh-NAY-shus

What It Means

1 a : not easily pulled apart : cohesive

b : tending to adhere or cling especially to another substance

2 : persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired

3 : retentive

tenacious in Context

Once Linda has decided on a course of action, she can be very tenacious when it comes to seeing it through.

"The demands on the men were extreme—no sleep, long distances to trek, limited supplies and a tenacious enemy are enough to test the cohesion of even the most disciplined teams." — Capt. Garrison Haning, Army Magazine, 1 Apr. 2019

Did You Know?

For the more than 400 years that tenacious has been a part of the English language, it has adhered closely to its Latin antecedent: tenax, an adjective meaning "tending to hold fast." Almost from the first, tenacious could suggest either literal adhesion or figurative stick-to-itiveness. Sandburs are tenacious, and so are athletes who don't let defeat get them down. We use tenacious of a good memory, too—one that has a better than average capacity to hold information. But you can also have too much of a good thing. The addition in Latin of the prefix per- ("thoroughly") to tenax led to the English word pertinacious, meaning "perversely persistent." You might use pertinacious for the likes of rumors and telemarketers, for example.