• glee •
Pronunciation: glee • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. (Mass noun) Mirth, merriment, joy, delight. 2. (Mass noun) Music, musical entertainment. 3. (Countable noun) A song for a chorus of usually male voices.
Notes: Here is a word that emerged from the same idea as gleam, glisten, glow, and gold, i.e. "shiny". It comes with two positive adjectives, gleeful and gleesome, and one negative, gleeless. A glee-club is a society engaged in singing glees.
In Play: The most common usage of this word appears in sentences like this: "William Arami danced with glee when Marian Kine accepted his proposal." However, the third meaning above is still around: "Rusty Horne broke away from popular composition when he composed five glees."
Word History: Today's Good Word goes back to Old English gliw, glew, or gleo, which came through its Germanic ancestors from Proto-Indo-European g'hel-/g'hol- "to shine", traces of which are found in Sanskrit harih "blond, yellow", Greek chloros "chartreuse, light green", Russian želtyi "yellow" and zoloto "gold", Serbian and Czech zlato "gold", Albanian diell "sun", Irish gealach "moon", Welsh haul "sun", Icelandic and Norwegian glans "luster, shine", Lithuanian geltonis "yellow", Latvian dzeltens "yellow", and English all words beginning with GL and meaning "to shine" plus gold and yellow.
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