This week’s theme
New words

This week’s words
clickbait
omnishambles
listicle
acquihire
paywall


This week’s comments
AWADmail 1036

Next week’s theme
Words related to time

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(PAY-wal)

MEANING:

noun: A system of restricting access to online content or services, making them accessible only upon payment.

ETYMOLOGY:

A combination of pay + wall. From Latin pacare (appease), from pax (peace) and vallum (rampart), from vallus (stake). Earliest documented use: 2004.

NOTES:

Here at Wordsmith.org, everything we publish and all of our services are openly accessible, made possible by the support of our readers. In the weekly AWADmail we include a section “Interesting Stories from the Net”. While some of the stories are behind paywalls, with each story we include a permalink that has an archived copy. We encourage you to support newspapers, such as The Guardian, that keep their material openly available.

USAGE:

“The squalid predation of many for-profit colleges. Georgia’s preposterous decision to put its legal code behind a private paywall. The examples demonstrate that private engagement, poorly managed, can indeed undermine public goods and services.”
John D. Donahue; Is It Unwise to Privatize?; The Washington Monthly; Nov/Dec 2021.

“Publishing behind paywalls is immoral.”
Mike Taylor; Hiding Your Research Behind a Paywall Is Immoral; The Guardian (London, UK); Jan 17, 2013.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: