Word of the Day

Did You Know?

When you hold down the delete key on your keyboard or touchscreen, the effect—whoosh!—is instantaneous. Deleterious effects, however, are often not so obvious; deleterious (ultimately from a Greek word meaning “to hurt”) is used to describe things that are harmful in ways that are unexpected, slow-acting, or not readily apparent. Although most often used in formal speech and writing, deleterious is far from rare. It even pops up from time to time in film and television, especially from the mouths of wonky characters, as when Seven of Nine warns the Doctor in an episode of Star Trek Voyager, “The nebula is having a deleterious effect on all the ship’s technology,” or when Higgins exclaims in the original Magnum P.I. series, “It’s shocking what a deleterious effect a regimen of nothing but mushrooms can have on a man.” We’ll take your word for it, Higgins.