• relevant •
Pronunciation: re-lê-vênt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Having a bearing on the matter at hand, pertinent, germane, apropos.
Notes: This word is sometimes mispronounced revelant and misspelled relevent. Careful how you pronounce and spell it. The adverb is relevantly and the noun is either relevance or relevancy. It may be negated, irrelevant, too.
In Play: When questions become more relevant to a problem than their answers, the answers tend to become new questions: "Mom, I don't see how price is relevant to the question of which shoes to buy." Relevance pops up frequently in our conversations: "We need to base our judgement of the president on criteria that are strictly relevant to performance."
Word History: English "borrowed" this word from Latin relevan(t)s "making lighter, alleviating" (hence "helpful"), the present participle of relevare "to lighten, lift up, raise". This verb is made up of re- "back (from, to)" + levare "to lighten, lift" based on levis "light, not heavy". Levis is what Latin made from PIE legwh- "light, not heavy", source also of Sanskrit laghu- "hasty; small", Greek elachys "small", Irish lag "faint", Welsh llewyg "faint, swoon", Russian and Ukrainian legkii "light", Serbian lak "light", Polish lekki "light", and Lithuanian lengvas "light, easy". The semantic shift from "helpful" to "pertinent" is a stretch, but anything helpful is relevant to the problem. (Today's most relevant Good Word was brought to us by an old friend in London, Tony Bowden, whose gift is hereby recognized.)
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