Daily Content Archive

Word of the Day
judder Definition: (verb) Shake or vibrate rapidly and intensively. Synonyms: shake Usage: The old engine was juddering and smoking, so I took the car to the mechanic.

Article of the Day

Randomness Random processes are repeating processes whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern. In mathematical, social, and religious settings, the term randomness refers to an innate "fairness" or lack of order or bias. Although randomness is an objective property, people often question whether a process is truly random. Many superstitions rest on the idea that seemingly random processes are actually governed by a hidden set of rules. How is randomness tied to the notion of free will? More...

This Day in History

Junko Tabei Becomes First Woman to Summit Mount Everest (1975) Tabei founded a climbing club for women in Japan in 1969 and, by 1972, was a recognized mountain climber. When Japanese newspaper and television companies sponsored an all-female expedition to climb Mount Everest, Tabei was one of the 15 women selected to go. In 1975, after months of training and preparation, the 35-year-old mother of two became the first woman to reach Everest's 29,035-foot (8,850-m) summit. What disaster partway up the slope nearly ended the climb? More...

Today's Birthday

Henry Jaynes Fonda (1905) Henry Fonda was an American film actor who started out on Broadway. His role in the 1934 play The Farmer Takes a Wife led to a role in the film version, and more than 100 other films followed. He portrayed honest men in movies such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and won an Academy Award in 1982 for his last film, On Golden Pond, made with his daughter, Jane. Married five times, he was also the father of actor Peter Fonda. Whose murder did Fonda witness as a teen? More...

Quotation of the Day
As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labor, and who had lost that inheritance; who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread; they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

Idiom of the Day
on (one's) tod — Without or not near to anyone else; on one's own; all alone. A shortening of the Cockney rhyming slang "on one's Tod Sloan," referring to a once-famous American horse jockey who fell into disrepute in the early 20th century and died penniless and alone. Primarily heard in UK. More...

Today's Holiday

St. Brendan's Day (2025) St. Brendan, who lived in the 6th century and is one of the most popular Irish saints, is alleged to be the author of Navigatio Brendani (the story of a journey to a land across the ocean). No one, including St. Brendan, knew where he had been when he returned, but a number of legends developed over the centuries. In 1977, an Irishman named Tim Severin built a boat out of leather as described in Navigatio and set out to follow St. Brendan's instructions. He ended up in Newfoundland, giving credence to the theory that St. Brendan reached America 1,000 years before Columbus. More...