On July 1, 1963, the United States Postal Service (USPS) introduces the Zone Improvement Plan as part of a plan to improve the speed of mail delivery, inaugurating the use of machine-readable ZIP codes to facilitate the efficient sorting of mail at a national level. The idea wasn’t totally new. In 1943, the Post Office […]

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 1, 2025 is:

verbose • \ver-BOHSS\  • adjective

Someone described as verbose tends to use many words to convey their point. Verbose can also describe something, such as a speech, that contains more words than necessary.

// The article documenting their meeting presented an odd exchange between a verbose questioner and a laconic interviewee.

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Examples:

"The dense, verbose text—over which some actors stumbled, understandably, on opening night—created a dizzying journey through a war between gods and mortals fought across time and place." — Rosa Cartagena, The Philadelphia Daily News, 19 Feb. 2025

Did you know?

There's no shortage of words to describe wordiness in English. Diffuse, long-winded, prolix, redundant, windy, repetitive, rambling, and circumlocutory are some that come to mind. Want to express the opposite idea? Try succinct, concise, brief, short, summary, terse, compact, or compendious. Verbose, which falls solidly into the first camp of words, comes from the Latin adjective verbōsus, from verbum, meaning "word." Other descendants of verbum include verb, adverb, proverb, verbal, and verbicide ("the deliberate distortion of the sense of a word").

By Christian J. Collier