immutable

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The Word of the Day for January 26 is: 

immutable   \ih-MYOO-tuh-bul\   adjective
          : not capable of or susceptible to change

Example sentence:
          "Emboldened local farmers, whose diets had for the past 200 years 
been nearly as immutable as those of their horses, began to drift over to the 
sushi bar to see what ...was going on." (William Hamilton, _Gourmet_, October 
2003)

Did you know?
          "Immutable" comes to us through Middle English from Latin 
"immutabilis," meaning "unable to change." "Immutabilis" was formed by 
combining the negative prefix "in-" with "mutabilis," which comes from the 
Latin verb "mutare" and means "to change." Some other English words that can be 
traced back to "mutare" are "commute" (the earliest sense of which is simply 
"to change or alter"), "mutate" ("to undergo significant and basic 
alteration"), "permute" ("to change the order or arrangement of"), and 
"transmute" ("to change or alter in form, appearance, or nature"). There's also 
the antonym of "immutable" -- "mutable" -- which of course can mean "prone to 
change" and "capable of change or of being changed."





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