- Today's Word
Dillydally
[DIL-ee-dal-ee]
Definition
- (verb) To waste time through aimless wandering or indecision, to procrastinate, or to delay taking action. It often implies a lack of urgency or purpose, typically when someone should be doing something more productive.
Example
The project manager grew increasingly frustrated as her team continued to dillydally instead of meeting their deadlines, causing delays in the overall project timeline.
Fun Fact
The term “dillydally” is believed to have originated in the 16th century as a reduplication of the word “dally,” which means to waste time or loiter. Reduplication (repeating a word or part of a word) is a common way to create emphasis in many languages, and in this case, it reinforces the idea of prolonged or repeated delay.
(adjective) Lacking substance, interest, or mature thought; naive and simplistic in a way that reveals inexperience.
The critic dismissed the debut novel as jejune — competently written, technically adequate, and utterly devoid of anything worth remembering.
Jejune derives from the Latin jejunus, meaning “fasting” or “empty” — literally describing a stomach that has not been fed. The same root gives us jejunum, the section of the small intestine named for its tendency to be found empty after death. It entered English in the 17th century carrying its literal sense of emptiness before acquiring its figurative meaning of something intellectually or creatively hollow — content that has the form of nourishment without any of the substance.