greenmail

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The Word of the Day for March 3 is: 

greenmail   \GREEN-mail\   noun
     : the practice of buying enough of a company's stock to threaten a hostile 
takeover and reselling it to the company at a price above market value; also : 
the money paid for such stock

Example sentence:
     A spokesperson for the company denied rumors of a greenmail attempt.

Did you know?
     "Greenmail" is a recent English coinage, but its history spans a 
millennium. In the Anglo-Saxon historical records for 1086, we find an early 
use of a word that still survives in Scottish English as "mail," meaning 
"payment" or "rent." The 16th century saw the appearance of the compound 
"blackmail," which was originally a tribute that freebooting chiefs at the 
Scottish border exacted in exchange for immunity from pillage. In 1862, the 
U.S. government began printing paper money using green ink, and soon the word 
"green" came to suggest money. Finally, in the 1980s, "greenmail" was coined by 
combining "green" and "blackmail" to describe a particular type of financial 
piracy.





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