Today's Word

Tenuous

TEN-yoo-us

Definition

(adjective) Weak, fragile, or insubstantial; having little strength, substance, or basis.

Example

Their partnership rested on a tenuous agreement that neither side fully trusted.

Word Origin

From Latin tenuis, meaning “thin” or “slender,” referring to something delicate or stretched out.

Fun Fact

In science, a tenuous atmosphere refers to one that’s thin and lacking density—like Mars’s or the upper reaches of Earth’s air. In language, the same image applies to fragile relationships or shaky ideas. Something tenuous feels as if it could collapse with the slightest breeze—a reminder of how fine the line can be between stability and uncertainty.

Previous Words

Insular

Today's Word

Insular

IN-syoo-ler

Definition

(adjective) Characterized by a narrow-minded focus on one’s own group or environment; closed off to outside ideas or perspectives.

Example

The company’s insular culture — promoting only from within, dismissing outside perspectives, and treating change as a threat — had quietly calcified into the biggest obstacle to its own growth.

Word Origin

Insular derives from the Latin insularis, meaning “of an island,” from insula — “island.” It entered English in the 17th century with its literal meaning of relating to islands before quickly acquiring its figurative sense of the psychological condition associated with island life — a worldview bounded by water on all sides, self-contained, and instinctively resistant to what lies beyond the shoreline. The British, as an island nation, have had a complicated relationship with the word ever since.

Fun Fact

Japan’s history offers perhaps the world’s most dramatic example of deliberate insularity in action. During the Edo period from 1603 to 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate enforced a policy of sakoku — literally “chained country” — that banned Japanese citizens from leaving Japan on pain of death and restricted foreign trade to a single Dutch outpost on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. The policy held for over two centuries, producing one of history’s most culturally distinct and internally sophisticated civilizations — and one of its most spectacular collisions with the outside world when American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his black ships in 1853 and ended the isolation almost overnight.

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Tenuous

Definition

Example

Word Origin

Previous Words

Insular

Insular

Definition

Example

Word Origin

Insular

Efficacious

Penurious

Unctuous

Adumbrate