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A.Word.A.Day--gloaming gloaming (GLO-ming) noun Twilight; dusk. [From Middle English gloming, from Old English glomung, from glom (dusk). Ultimately from Indo-European root ghel- (to shine) that is also the source of words such as yellow, gold, glimmer, glimpse, glass, arsenic, melancholy and cholera.] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus. "This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914). "The book is a marked departure from previous (Robert) Harris works set in the chill gloaming of mid-20th-century European history, an era that has fascinated him since he was a child ..." Alan Cowell; A Writer's Allegories For Today; International Herald Tribune (Paris, France); Nov 18, 2003. This week's theme: words derived from Old English. X-Bonus The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. -Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920- )

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