tome
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It's the word of the day for January 6th.

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 tome, spelled T-O-M-E. Tome is a noun. It's a formal word for a book and especially a very large, thick, often scholarly book. Here's the word used in a sentence from Hype Beast magazine by Sarah Kearns.

The way that we've approached publishing at Climax is almost having these two very separate worlds that live perfectly together, Isabella Burley says of her business's work in both the archival and contemporary worlds.

Climax returned with its second title earlier this month, a 550-page tome surveying 10 years of images produced between 2014 and 2024 by artist Martine Sims, whose work examines themes of identity, gender, and black culture. When is a book not a book? When it's a tome. Tome being a word that has always suggested something less or more than the word book.

When "tome" was first used in English, it referred to a book that was part of a larger multi-volume work, which makes sense given that it comes from "tomos," a Greek noun meaning "section" or "roll of papyrus," that comes in turn from the verb "temnine," meaning "to cut." In ancient times, long scrolls of papyrus were often divided into sections.

When tome retains this meaning today, it usually refers instead to a book that is larger and more scholarly than average, as evidenced by some of the most common adjectives that precede it, including weighty, lengthy, massive, heavy, hefty, and academic. With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit Merriam-Webster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.