dander

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The Word of the Day for October 18 is:

dander \DAN-der\ noun
     1 : dandruff; specifically : minute scales from hair, 
feathers, or skin that may be allergenic 
    *2: anger, temper

Example sentence:
     Seeing his ex-girlfriend with another guy only a week after 
they broke up really got Stan's dander up.

Did you know?
     How did "dander" acquire its "anger" sense? Etymologists 
have come up with a few possibilities, but nothing is known for 
sure. Some experts have proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that the 
meaning stems from the image of an angry person tearing up his 
or her hair by the fistful, scattering dandruff in the process. 
Some think it may come from a West Indian word "dander," which 
refers to a kind of ferment and suggests "rising" anger (in 
English, "ferment" can mean either "an agent capable of causing 
fermentation" or "a state of unrest or excitement"). Yet another 
proposed possibility is that the anger sense was imported to 
America by early Dutch colonists and is from their phrase "op 
donderen," meaning "to burst into a sudden rage."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.