• anniversary •
Pronunciation: æn-ê-vêr-sêr-ri • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, Adjective
Meaning: The annual recurrence of the date of an important event in some previous year or the celebration thereof.
Notes: Some people think that today's Good Word is misused. There should be no 'six-month anniversary' of anything, since the meaning contains the sense of "annual". However, all western European languages allow the same latitude, so we may as well chalk it up as language change at this point. Since this word may be used as an adjective (anniversary celebration), it has an adverbial form: anniversarily, as in 'anniversarily celebrated'.
In Play: Remember the actual meaning of the word when you use it in phrases like this: "AlphaDictionary celebrated its 15th anniversary in December of 2019, a rather long existence for a website." Remember anniversaries occur once a year, no more, no less: "Marley celebrated the anniversary of his 25 years of service to the company by resigning."
Word History: Middle English copied anniversarie from French, which inherited it from Medieval Latin (dies) anniversaria "anniversary (day)". This developed from the feminine of the Classical Latin compound adjective anniversarius "recurring yearly", based on the words annus "year" + versus, the past participle of vertere "to turn". Annus comes from a suffixed form of the Proto-Indo-European word at- "go": at-no. The result in Latin, annus, produced many words that English borrowed, such as annual, annuity, annals, not to mention words on -enni- such as millennium and biennial. Vertere comes from the same PIE root meaning "turn, twist" as English wreath, writhe and weird, originally meaning "twisted". (Yesterday Dr. and Mrs. Goodword quietly celebrated the 60th anniversary of their marriage at home with a small group of friends.)
