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• glee •

Pronunciation: glee • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. (Mass noun) Mirth, merriment, joy, delight. 2. (Mass noun) Music, musical entertainment. 3. (Countable noun) A song for a chorus of usually male voices.

Notes: Here is a word that emerged from the same idea as gleam, glisten, glow, and gold, i.e. "shiny". It comes with two positive adjectives, gleeful and gleesome, and one negative, gleeless. A glee-club is a society engaged in singing glees.

In Play: The most common usage of this word appears in sentences like this: "William Arami danced with glee when Marian Kine accepted his proposal." However, the third meaning above is still around: "Rusty Horne broke away from popular composition when he composed five glees."

Word History: Today's Good Word goes back to Old English gliw, glew, or gleo, which came through its Germanic ancestors from Proto-Indo-European g'hel-/g'hol- "to shine", traces of which are found in Sanskrit harih "blond, yellow", Greek chloros "chartreuse, light green", Russian želtyi "yellow" and zoloto "gold", Serbian and Czech zlato "gold", Albanian diell "sun", Irish gealach "moon", Welsh haul "sun", Icelandic and Norwegian glans "luster, shine", Lithuanian geltonis "yellow", Latvian dzeltens "yellow", and English all words beginning with GL and meaning "to shine" plus gold and yellow.

But the obvious German "gelb" (yellow) is missing from this list.

And there's also "glib", perhaps not so welcome in this company, but from the same stem.

The Greek chloros makes me wonder about the bleach, Clorox. I tried looking it up last night but got nowhere. Anyone know where Clorox got its name?

According to the Wikipedia page

The name of its original product, Clorox, was coined as a portmanteau of its two main ingredients, chlorine and sodium hydroxide

According to etymon line,

[Chlorine, the] nonmetallic element, the name coined 1810 by English chemist Sir Humphry Davy from Latinized form of Greek khlōros "pale green" (from PIE root *ghel- (2) "to shine," with derivatives denoting "green" and "yellow") + chemical suffix -ine (2). Named for its color. Discovered 1774, but known at first as oxymuriatic acid gas, or dephlogisticated marine acid.

Note the citation of PIE "ghel" which is what we are interested in here

I guess it is the green root. Which reminds me of another laundry thing out there, the one 'with bluing for extra whiteness', which I also always found curious. I don't remember the brand, but I do remember that line.

I can remember when old, white-haired women would bleach their hair and it would come out as pale blue. Anyone else remember that?

I can remember when old, white-haired women would bleach their hair and it would come out as pale blue. Anyone else remember that?

Yes, I do remember that. An expression of that time was “blue-haired ladies” to refer to older women of a certain type. Today that atavistic expression would be confusing because coloring or streaking one’s hair in primary colors such as blue, green, red or yellow has become a popular fashion or cultural statement that crosses gender and age categories.