- Today's Word
Mawkish
MAW-kish
Definition
(adjective) Overly sentimental or emotional to the point of being unpleasant.
Example
The movie’s mawkish ending drew eye-rolls rather than tears.
Fun Fact
Mawkish originally referred to a nauseating or spoiled taste, stemming from the Middle English mauk, meaning “maggot.” Over time, the meaning shifted from physical disgust to emotional excess. Today, it’s used to describe songs, movies, or writing that lay on the sentiment so thick it turns people off.
(noun/verb) A gentle, continuous murmuring sound made by water or a person speaking rapidly and excitedly.
The hikers followed the burble of the stream through the dense forest long before they could see it, the sound guiding them toward water and rest.
Burble is an example of onomatopoeia — a word whose sound imitates the thing it describes. It emerged in Middle English as an imitative word for the sound of bubbling or gurgling water, related to the Old French borboiller, meaning “to bubble.” Lewis Carroll famously used it in Jabberwocky — “the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came” — cementing its place in the English literary imagination as a word that sounds exactly like what it means.