Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 3, 2026 is:
 
 
 
 
 engender &#149; \in-JEN-der\&nbsp; &#149; verb
 Engender is a formal word that means “to be the source or cause of something.”

// Our monthly book club meetings started as a way to connect and ended up being a great place to engender unity and build life-long friendships. 

<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engender">See the entry ></a> 
 
 
 
 Examples:
 “... ‘During a moment defined by anti-intellectualism, escapism, and AI tools that let you skip cognitive work entirely ... intellectual creators are doing something kinda countercultural,’ says Death To Stock’s culture researcher Agus Panzoni. These influencers, who have already built established communities around intellectual pursuits, hold greater meaning and engender more trust ...” — Markiel Magsalin, Vogue, 15 Apr. 2026 
 
 
 
 Did you know?
 A good paragraph about engender will engender understanding in the reader. Like its synonym <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generate">generate</a>, engender comes from the Latin verb generare, meaning “to generate” or “to beget,” and when the word was first used in the 14th century, engender meant “<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propagate">propagate</a>” or “<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/procreate">procreate</a>.” That literal meaning having to do with creating offspring (which generate shared when it was adopted in the early 16th century) was soon joined by the “to cause to exist or develop, to produce” meaning most familiar to us today. Generare didn’t just engender generate and engender; <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regenerate">regenerate</a>, <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/degenerate">degenerate</a>, and <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generation">generation</a> have the same Latin root. As you might suspect, the list of engender relatives does not end there. Generare comes from the Latin noun genus, meaning “origin” or “kind.” From this source we took our own word <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genus">genus</a>, plus <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender">gender</a>, <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/general">general</a>, and <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generic">generic</a>, among other words.

Podurama

Home

Trending

Personal

Your Podcasts

New Episodes

My Files

Favourite Episodes

Tags (Folders)

Recently Played

Bookmarks

Followed Playlists

engender

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

AI Chapters

AI Insights

Reviews