It's the Word of the Day podcast for March 25th.

Today's word is Hobbit, spelled H-O-B-B-I-T.

Hobbit is a noun. A hobbit is a member of a fictitious, peaceful, and friendly race of small human-like creatures

that dwell underground. Here's the word used in a sentence from lithub.com. Hobbits were no part of

Tolkien's original plan. They entered rather late and through a side door as the unexpected

central characters in a children's story, The Hobbit, which Tolkien invented

for his own children, but which found an immediate and lasting worldwide audience, and of which

the Lord of the Rings was the commissioned, long-awaited, and trebly successful sequel.

What is a Hobbit, wrote J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1937 fantasy novel that introduced Mr. Bilbo Baggins.

The author then answered himself,

They are or were little people, about half-hour height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves.

There is little or no magic about them except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to

disappear when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along.

Tolkien tells us that hobbits are inclined to be fat and that they dress in bright colors.

They have good-natured faces and deep fruity laughs, especially after dinner.

Tolkien, a professional linguist who taught at Oxford, coined the word Hobbit and many other terms,

in fact a whole new language, for the Hobbit and for his enormously popular three-part novel,

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

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