lagniappe

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Decorate your game boards this season with new words from
The Official SCRABBLE(R) Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?scrabdic.htm&3
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The Word of the Day for December 14 is:

lagniappe   \LAN-yap\   noun
     : a small gift given a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase; 
broadly : something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure 

Example sentence: 
     The Garcia family's store always has the best holiday-themed lagniappes; 
this year with a $20 purchase you receive a hand-painted snowman figurine.

Did you know? 
     "We picked up one excellent word," wrote Mark Twain in _Life on the 
Mississippi_ (1883), "a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice 
limber, expressive, handy word -- 'lagniappe'.... It is Spanish -- so they 
said." Twain encapsulates the history of "lagniappe" quite nicely. English 
speakers learned the word from French-speaking Louisianians, but they in turn 
had adapted it from the American Spanish word "la napa." Twain went on to 
describe how New Orleanians completed shop transactions by saying "Give me 
something for lagniappe," to which the shopkeeper would respond with "a bit of 
liquorice-root, ... a cheap cigar or a spool of thread." It took a while for 
"lagniappe" to catch on throughout the country, but by the mid-20th century, 
New Yorkers and New Orleanians alike were familiar with this "excellent word."