Word of the Day

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There is an abundance—you could almost say a surfeit—of English words that come from the Latin verb facere, meaning "to do." The connection to facere is fairly obvious for words spelled with "fic," "fac," or "fec," such as sacrifice, fact, and infect. For words like stupefy (a modification of the Latin word stupefacere) and hacienda (originally, in Old Spanish and Latin, facienda) the facere relation is not so apparent. As for surfeit, a "c" was dropped along the path that led from Latin through Anglo-French, where facere became faire ("to do") and sur- was added to make the verb surfaire, meaning "to overdo." It is the Anglo-French noun surfet ("excess"), however, that Middle English borrowed, eventually settling on the spelling surfeit.