Aurore
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 29 is:
diapause \DIE-uh-pauze\ (noun)
: a period of physiologically enforced dormancy between
periods of activity
Example sentence:
The research team was thrilled when they successfully
hatched 300-year-old crustacean eggs that they had found in
a state of diapause in the mud at the bottom of a New
England pond.
Did you know?
"Diapause," from the Greek word "diapausis," meaning "pause,"
may have been coined by the entomologist William Wheeler in
1893. Wheeler's focus was insects, but diapause, a
spontaneous period of suspended animation that seems to
happen in response to adverse environmental conditions, also
occurs in the development of crustaceans, snails, and other
animals. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates exercised poetic license
and gave the word a human application in her short story
"Visitation Rights" (1988): "... her life, seemingly in
shambles, ... was not ruined; ... injured perhaps, and surely
stunted, but only temporarily. There had been a diapause,
and that was all ...."
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