A.Word.A.Day--hades

Wordsmith.org

The Magic of Words

Sep 14, 2010

This week's theme
Fabled lands

This week's words
camelot
hades

Hades with Cerberus
Heraklion Archeo. Museum, Greece

Photo: Aviad Bublil

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Hades

PRONUNCIATION:

(HAY-deez)

MEANING:

noun: Hell.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek Haides, the god of the underworld in Greek mythology. The word is ultimately from the Indo-European root weid- (to see), which is also the source of words such as guide, wise, vision, advice, idea, story, and history. Hades derives from this root in the sense of invisible or unseen.

USAGE:

"The monstrous Greek debt and budget deficits have pushed the country to the very door of economic Hades."
Eric Reguly; Ireland; The Globe and Mail (Canada); Apr 1, 2010.

Explore "hades" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that. -Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

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