It's Merriam-Webster's word of the day for August 18th.

Today's word is impugn.

Today's word is impugn.

Impune is a verb.

To impugn something such as a person's integrity or judgment

is to attack or oppose it as false or lacking integrity.

Here's the word used in a sentence from Pitch Fork by Grayson Haver Curran.

Singer Grace Cummings is not shy about courting legendary company.

After all, the protagonist of Ramona, a smoldering pseudo-Goth number that ultimately flames into a full torch song is borrowed from Bob Dylan.

There's a bit of Johnny Cash's cry, cry, cry, toward the end of Everybody Somebody, which borrows

the sound of Memphis's stacks rather than its son to impugn a wayward partner.

The words impugn, pugnacious, and putilist are all fighting words, literally. All three trace back to the Latin noun

pugnus meaning fist, though they floated like butterflies down different paths into English from that shared source, each stings like a bee, so to speak, in its own way.

The noun pugilist refers to a fighter or boxer while the adjective pugnacious describes

someone showing a readiness or desire to fight or argue. The verb impugn

today has belligerent implications, albeit of the verbal jousting kind, but in its earliest

known English uses in the 1300s, impugn could refer to a physical attack, as in the troops impugned the city, as well as to assaults involving verbal contradiction or dispute.

Over time, though, the sense of literal battling has become obsolete, while the

assailing by words or arguments sense has endured.

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