It's the Word of the Day podcast for February 27th.

Today's word is doff, spelled D-O-F-F. Dough is a verb. To doff a hat or other piece of clothing is to take it off.

Here's the word used in a sentence from lithub.com by Rob Marland.

On the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco, Oscar Wilde was introduced to a group of reporters

who courteously doffed their hats.

Wilde failed to return the gesture, much to the annoyance of one interviewer who used it

as a pretext for blasting Wilde in his article. Time was, people talked about doffing and

donning articles of clothing with about the same frequency. But in the mid-19th century,

the verb dawn became significantly more popular and left Doff to flounder a bit in the mid-19th century the verb dawn became significantly more popular and left

Doff to flounder a bit in linguistic semi-obscurity.

Doff and Don have been a pair from the start, both date from the 14th century, with

Doff arising as a middle English contraction of the phrase to do off,

and Don as a contraction of to-do-on.

Shakespeare was among the first, as far as we know,

to use the word as it's defined in the more general sense of

to rid oneself of or put aside.

He has Juliet give voice to this sense when she says,

What's in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo doff thy name, and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

Visit Miriamwebster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.

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