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Discuss Email this Feedback RSS/XML Permalink A.Word.A.Day--testate This week's theme: words that turn into other words when beheaded. testate (TES-tayt) adjective Having made a legally valid will. [From Latin testatus (witnessed), from testari (to bear witness or to make a will). Ultimately from the Indo-European root trei- (three) that's also the source of such words as three, testify (to be the third person: to bear witness), and triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13).] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus. -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "'You want to do the will tonight?' my wife would coo. We put it off. The sight of a blank will leaves a man too testy to be testate." Steve Rubenstein; Where There's a Will There's a Clark; San Francisco Chronicle; Aug 19, 1991. X-Bonus When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together. -Jacob A. Riis, journalist and social reformer (1849-1914)

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