Pyrrhic

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The Word of the Day for June 25 is:

Pyrrhic   \PEER-ik\   adjective 
     : achieved at excessive cost; also : costly to the point of negating or 
outweighing expected benefits 

Example sentence: 
     Gretchen's unexpected win over the tournament's top player proved a 
Pyrrhic victory; in the effort, she reinjured her shoulder.

Did you know? 
     In 306 B.C., at the age of twelve, a youth named Pyrrhus took the throne 
of Epirus, a country in northwestern Greece. Pyrrhus grew to be an aggressive 
and quarrelsome king, given to warring with his neighbors. In 280 B.C., he 
brought 25,000 men (and a number of elephants) to southern Italy and defeated 
the Romans, but only after losing many of his soldiers. A year later, he again 
suffered heavy casualties at Roman hands in a battle at Ausculum. According to 
Plutarch, when he was congratulated on those victories Pyrrhus replied, 
"Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone." The bloody battles of 
Pyrrhus didn't find their way into English in the phrase "Pyrrhic victory" 
until the 1800s, but once it was established it quickly found occupation as an 
adjective even independent of the phrase, in such constructions as "the 
vindication was Pyrrhic" and "a Pyrrhic gesture."