galvanize

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

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🗓️ 8 December 2024

⏱️ 3 minutes

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Summary

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 8, 2024 is:

galvanize • \GAL-vuh-nyze\ • verb

To galvanize people is to cause them to be so excited or concerned about something that they are driven to action.

// The council’s proposal to close the library has galvanized the town’s residents.

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Examples:

“The original Earth Day was the product of a new environmental consciousness created by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, and of public horror in 1969 that the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted it caught fire. … On April 22, 1970, some 20 million people attended thousands of events across America, and this galvanizing public demand led in short order to the creation, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973), and much more after that.” — Todd Stern, The Atlantic, 6 Oct. 2024

Did you know?

Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist who, in the 1770s, studied the electrical nature of nerve impulses by applying electrical stimulation to frogs’ leg muscles, causing them to contract. Although Galvani’s theory that animal tissue contained an innate electrical impulse was disproven, the French word galvanisme came to refer to a current of electricity especially when produced by chemical action, while the verb galvaniser was used for the action of applying such a current (both words were apparently coined by German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who modeled them after the French equivalents of magnetism and magnetize). In English, these words came to life as galvanism and galvanize, respectively. Today their primary senses are figurative: to galvanize a person or group is to spur them into action as if they’ve been jolted with electricity.

Transcript

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0:42.1	Today's word is galvanize, spell G-A-L-V-A-N-I-Z-E. Galvanize is a verb. To galvanize people is to cause them
0:51.5	to be so excited or concerned about something that they are driven to
0:55.4	action. Here's the word used in a sentence from the Atlantic by Todd Stern. The original Earth Day was
1:01.9	the product of a new environmental consciousness created by Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring,
1:08.6	and of public horror in 1969 that the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted it caught fire.
1:16.6	On April 22nd, 1970, some 20 million people attended thousands of events across America,
1:23.6	and this galvanizing public demand led in short order to the creation during Richard Nixon's presidency
1:30.5	of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the Clean Air Act, also in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972,
1:39.5	and the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and much more after that.
1:52.6	Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist, who in the 1770s studied the electrical nature of nerve impulses by applying electrical stimulation to frogs' leg muscles, causing
1:59.8	them to contract. Although Galvvanis theory that animal tissue contained an innate electrical impulse was disproven,
2:07.6	the French word galvanism came to refer to a current of electricity, especially when produced by chemical action.
2:15.6	While the verb galvanized was used for the action of
2:19.8	applying such a current, both words were apparently coined by German naturalist Alexander von
2:26.0	Humboldt, who modeled them after the French equivalents of magnetism and magnetize. In English, these
2:33.3	words came to life as galvanism and galvanize, respectively.
	...

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