aerie

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The Word of the Day for December 12 is: 

aerie   \AIR-ee\   noun
     1 : the nest of a bird on a cliff or a mountaintop 
    *2 : an elevated often secluded dwelling, structure, or position 

Example sentence:
     Joe lives in a sleek, 20th-floor aerie with a spectacular view of the city.

Did you know?
     English poet John Milton put a variant of "aerie" to good use in _Paradise 
Lost_ (1667), writing "...there the eagle and the stork / On cliffs and cedar 
tops their eyries build." But Milton wasn't the first to use the term, which 
comes to us via Medieval Latin and Old French and probably traces to an earlier 
Latin word for "nest" or "lair." English speakers had been employing "aerie" as 
a word for "bird's nest" for more than a century when Milton penned those 
words. Eventually, "aerie" was applied to human dwellings as well as birds' 
nests. At first, this sense referred to dwellings nestled high up in mountains 
or hills. These days, you're also likely to hear high-rise city apartments or 
offices referred to as "aeries."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence. 





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