It's Merriam-Webster's word of the day for August 17th. Today's word is copious, spelled C-O-P-I-O-U-N-N-T-E-N-N-T-E-N-N-T-E-N-T-E-N-T-E-I-O-U-S. Copious is an adjective.

It's a synonym of the words abundant and plentiful.

It's always used before a noun to describe something very large in amount or number.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the Rob report by Tori Latham.

My colleagues were more than gracious enough to take some time out of their day to taste test copious amounts of chocolate.

Despite meaning abundance, the Latin word copia has not led to an abundance of words in English.

In other words, its descendants are far from copious, at least on the surface.

There's copious, of course, which comes from Copia by way of middle English and has been used since the 14th century when it described things such as farmlands or ore deposits that produce abundant yields.

Then there's Corinucopia, which combines this same route with Cornu, meaning horn,

and refers to an inexhaustible store or abundance of something, as well as to a decorative

horn or horn-shaped basket overflowing with produce, and used as a symbol of abundance.

Finally, there's the commonplace word copy,

used as both noun and verb.

That's all she wrote, unless you consider the mucho copious amount,

nay cornucopia, of words that start or end with copy, from copy cat to photocopy

to copy pasta.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit Marion Webster.com today, for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.