fulminate
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It's the Word of the Day podcast for January 4th.

They're part of the more than 300,000 jobs BP supports across the country. Learn more at bp.com slash investing in America. Today's word is fulminate, spelled F-U-L-M-I-N-A-T-E. Fulminate is a verb. To fulminate is to complain loudly or angrily about something. Here's the word used in a sentence from The New Yorker by Daniel Emerwar.

When Reagan fulminated against the Soviet Union, his aides, fearing nuclear war, challenged him. Lightning strikes more than once in the history of the word fulminate.

It comes from the late Latin fulminare, meaning to strike down or confound an opponent, which in turn traces back to the Latin verb meaning to strike, used of lightning, or simply to strike like lightning. That word's source is the noun fulmen, meaning lightning.

When fulminate was taken up by English speakers in the 15th century, it lost much of its ancestral thunder and was used largely as a technical term for the issuing of formal denunciations by church authorities. In time, its original lightning spark returned, and it's now used when someone issues verbal lightning strikes in the midst of a brouhaha, tirade, or tweet storm. With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

Visit Merriam-Webster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.