|
Home
|
Oct 19, 2026
This week’s themeZ in the spotlight This week’s words 
Mammon, 1885
Art: George Frederic Watts Previous week’s theme Words that look like misspellings Wordsmith Games
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargIn Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Kent calls Oswald “Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!” Unnecessary? Try spelling zeal without it. Kent can zip it. Z may ride at the back of the alphabet, but this week it gets the spotlight. Mon’s word has one Z, Tue’s has two, Wed’s has three, and Thu’s has four. And Fri? Will we catch five Zs? Stay awake. The last letter gets the last word. For one week, we’re all Gen Z. PS: In Shakespeare’s day, Z was rarely used in English, and S often did its work. Kent was calling Oswald just as dispensable. zillionaire
PRONUNCIATION:
(zil-yuh-NAYR)
MEANING:
noun: A person with incalculably enormous wealth.
ETYMOLOGY:
From zillion (a very large but unspecified amount), patterned on million
and billion. Earliest documented use: 1926.
NOTES:
A zillion has no fixed value, but Forbes estimated the zillionaire
in the usage example below to be worth $1.1 trillion on Jun 12, 2026.
At $1 million a day, that sum would last more than 3,000 years. Years,
not days. And that little .1 after the decimal point stands for $100
billion all by itself.
USAGE:
“Consider, too, what X, formerly Twitter, has done to our public discourse.
And that was before it was run aground by the zillionaire man-baby Elon
Musk (South African but a product of the Silicon Valley cult of radical
individualism).” Ed Power; The Dropout Review; The Irish Times (Dublin); Mar 23, 2024. See more usage examples of zillionaire in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
In general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative;
pessimists about the future and optimists about the past. -Lewis Mumford,
writer and philosopher (19 Oct 1895-1990)
|
|
Subscriber Services
Awards | Stats | Links | Privacy Policy
Contribute | Advertise
Awards | Stats | Links | Privacy Policy
Contribute | Advertise
© 1994-2026 Wordsmith