It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 1st.

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Today's word is scintilla, spelled S-C-I-N-T-I-L-A.

Sintilla is a noun. A scintilla is a very small amount of something.

Centilla is usually used in negative statements, as in not even or nary a centilla.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the stranger's house writing Northern Ireland by

Alexander Putes.

There was one part of his Irish childhood that would follow Oscar Wilde across the sea to England,

a tiny part of his childhood, admittedly, the merest scintilla of his youth.

Wonder what scintillas or scintillii are?

It may help spark your memory to look up above the world so high at the tiny, to our eyes, stars twinkling like diamonds in the sky.

Centilla comes directly from Latin, where it refers to a spark, that is, a bright flash, such as you might see, from a burning ember.

The noun scintilla is related to the verb, scintillare, which means to sparkle,

and is responsible for the English verb, scintillate, meaning to sparkle or gleam.

In the 17th century, English carried over this glittering particle sense, which is still in use

today, as when Scottish writer Rudy Zagadlo wrote of the Gulf of Mexico

fizzing with scintillas underneath the rising sun. In the same century, people also began

using scintilla figuratively for a hint or trace of something that barely suggests its presence.

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