Word of the Day
: March 20, 2025vernal
playWhat It Means
Vernal is a formal adjective that describes something that relates to or occurs in the spring.
// It is such a relief after a long, cold winter to see the trees and flowers in their glorious vernal bloom.
vernal in Context
“I visited the wetland as best I could, given my professional obligations and peripatetic lifestyle, which often nurtured anything but stillness. Still, I baked and sweated in the summer sun, drew a thick down jacket around me on cold and snowy winter days, huddled in vernal rain, lounged in fall light.” — Christopher Norment, Terrain.org, 18 Sept. 2024
Did You Know?
“The sun’s coming soon. / A future, then, of warmth and runoff, / and old faces surprised to see us. / A cache of love, I’d call it, / opened up, vernal, refreshed.” These are the closing lines of the poem “Runoff” by Sidney Burris, and even if you don’t (yet) know the word vernal, you can probably divine its meaning from context. The sun’s arrival? Melting snow and ice? Optimism? It all sure sounds like spring, the muse of many a poet and the essence of vernal, an adjective that describes all things related to the season. While the sun has been crossing the equator since time immemorial, producing a vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere in late March and in the southern hemisphere in late September, the word vernal has only been in use in English since the early 16th century, when it blossomed from the Latin adjective vernālis. That word in turn traces back to the noun vēr, meaning “spring.”
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
Rearrange the letters to form a word referring to any of a number of herbs of the iris family having solitary long-tubed flowers and slender linear leaves that are often one of the first signs of spring: SCCOUR
VIEW THE ANSWER
