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WORD OF THE DAY: Travesty, Weekly Words

travesty  •   \TRAV-uh-stee\  •  noun

1 : a burlesque translation or literary or artistic imitation usually grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment, or subject matter

*2 : a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation Example sentence:

The new movie is a travesty of a documentary, likely to appeal only to the lowest sense of humor.


Did you know?

"Travesty," which first appeared in print in English as a noun in 1674, comes from the French verb "travestir," meaning "to disguise." The word's roots, however, wind back through Italian to Latin. That ancient tongue includes the verb "vestire," a verb meaning "to clothe" or "to dress." "Vestire" is the ancestor of "travesty" and a number of other English words, including "transvestite," "divest," and "investiture." "Travesty," incidentally, can also be a verb meaning "to make a travesty of" or "to parody"; the verb predates the noun in English by a single year.


Word Definition/s and Example Information provided by Merrian-Webster Online. Visit them at M-w.com, or view today's word information from them at: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwodarch.pl?May.27.

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