sleuth: M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for October 26 is:

sleuth \SLOOTH\ verb
*intransitive verb : to act as a detective : search for information
transitive verb : to search for and discover

Example sentence:
After several employees complained of nausea, a shrewd bit of medical sleuthing turned up the culprit: a bacterium in the drinking water.

Did you know?
"They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed "sleuth" from Old Norse, the term referred to "the track of an animal or person." In Scotland, a "sleuthhound" was a bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice. In 19th century U.S. English, "sleuthhound" became an epithet for a detective and was soon shortened to "sleuth." From there, it was only a short leap to turning "sleuth" into a verb describing what a sleuth does.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

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