scupper: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

[Dictionary.com]

	Word of the Day for Friday, March 8, 2013 scupper \SKUHP-er\, verb: 1. Informal. to prevent from happening or succeeding; ruin; wreck. 2. Military. to overwhelm; surprise and destroy, disable, or massacre. But what if Ira had tried to back out, threatening to scupper the entire thing? -- Mark Zuehlke, Hands Like Clouds, 2000 Last summer, Edward DeMarco, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's regulator, scuppered the White House's plan to write down principal for half a million homeowners who'd fallen behind on payments, listing among his reasons that it would encourage others to stop paying. -- Tad Friend, "Home Economics," The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2013 Scupper first entered English as a nautical noun in the late 1400s. The verb senses did not enter English until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Read the full entry | See synonyms | Comment on today's word | Suggest tomorrow's word Yesterday's word | Previous words | Help Words of the Day? How about words of timeless wisdom? Introducing our Quotes channel! "Life itself is a quotation." - Jorge Luis Borges Check out the Quote of the Day ›› How do you use this slippery piece of punctuation: the slash? The slash (/)-sometimes called a slant, a solidus, a stroke, or a virgule-is a commonly employed symbol in the English language. Whatever you want to call this piece of punctuation, its role in English has greatly changed over time. The word slash first entered English in the late 14th century as a verb to describe the... Read more ›› Dictionary.com Word of the Day You are subscribed to the Word of the Day as: e-dict...@googlegroups.com Subscriber since: January 06, 2008 Unsubscribe from the Word of the Day To subscribe to the Word of the Day by email, please send a blank message to: join-wor...@lists.lexico.com ©2013 by Dictionary.com, LLC. 555 12th Street Suite 500 Oakland CA 94607 Subscriptions to the Word of the Day can also be managed online   Tell a friend about the Word of the Day!