A.Word.A.Day --zugunruhe

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Dec 8, 2025

This week’s theme
Illustrated words

This week’s words
zugunruhe

Illustration: Leah Palmer Preiss

Previous week’s theme
Words for people

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Each year I send a handful of words to the artist Leah Palmer Preiss and then... I wait. Inspiration cannot be rushed.

While waiting, I ponder our roles in this world. I respect all skills from plumbers to programmers, but artists occupy a special frame in my heart. A plumber can fix a leak or clog in an hour (and thank goodness for that!), and you soon forget about it. But an artist creates a portrait that lingers in your memory for years.

I admire anyone who follows their creative compass. It’s easier to get hired to fix a faucet than to paint a portrait, yet artists keep choosing the path where the pay is uncertain but the passion is unmistakable.

Are you an artist? Tell us about your craft, whether you work with paints or pixels, clay or code, wood or marble, or something that defies tidy categories. Share below or email us at words@wordsmith.org. Please include your location (city, state).

And while you browse this week’s illustrated words, if Leah’s art brings you delight, let her know at curiouser@mindspring.com. So often we admire quietly, but we all need a splash of appreciation now and then. See her previous years’ art here.

zugunruhe

PRONUNCIATION:

(TSOOK-oon-roo-uh)

MEANING:

noun: Restlessness at the beginning of a migration period.

ETYMOLOGY:

From German Zugunruhe, from Zug (move, migration) + Unruhe (anxiety, restlessness). Earliest documented use: 1950.

NOTES:

If you have ever felt a tingle of anxiety before a move, even an in-town move, you have experienced zugunruhe. Migratory animals, especially birds, feel it too. Zugunruhe was originally observed in caged birds that would flutter wildly at night during migration season, even if they had never migrated before.

Around 4:45 pm on Fri, do you see a zugunruhe at your workplace as employees instinctively feel ready to migrate to the nearest happy hour?

The German word Zug, meaning move or migration, also appears in chess: zugzwang.

USAGE:

“Among songbirds in fall, cool temperatures intensify zugunruhe and warm temperatures diminish it, and the birds usually wait for nights with steady northerly winds to give them a push south.”
Scott Weidensaul; Living on the Wind; North Point Press; 2000.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. -James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)

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