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\n \n Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 15, 2024 is:\n \n

\n liminal • \\LIM-uh-nul\\  • adjective
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Liminal is a formal word most often used to describe an intermediate state, phase, or condition. It can also describe something that is barely perceptible or barely capable of eliciting a response.

// The essay presents an image of the border region as a liminal zone where one culture blends into another.

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\n Examples:
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\u201cThe House of Broken Bricks is set in a fictional village situated on the very real Somerset Levels in southwest England. This is a liminal space that despite ongoing modernization is constantly fighting to revert into ancient marshlands. Here the flora and fauna intrude into everyday living, whether it be through the ritual hunting of roe deer come autumn, the picking of ripe sloes for gin, the return of house martins every spring or the war against cabbage white caterpillars on the salad greens.\u201d \u2014 Fiona Williams, LitHub.com, 10 Apr. 2024

\n Did you know?
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Liminal is a word for the in-between. It describes states, times, spaces, etc., that exist at a point of change\u2014a metaphorical threshold\u2014as in \u201cthe liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness.\u201d The idea of a threshold is at the word\u2019s root; it comes from Latin limen, meaning \u201cthreshold.\u201d In technical use liminal means \u201cbarely perceptible\u201d or \u201cbarely capable of eliciting a response,\u201d and it has a familiar partner with a related meaning: subliminal can mean \u201cinadequate to produce a sensation or a perception,\u201d though it more often means \u201cexisting or functioning below the threshold of consciousness.\u201d Limen has served as the basis for a number of other English words, including eliminate (\u201cto cast out\u201d), sublime (\u201clofty in conception or expression\u201d), preliminary (\u201cintroductory\u201d), and the woefully underused postliminary (\u201csubsequent\u201d).