zaftig

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 4, 2016 is: zaftig • \ZAHF-tig\  • adjective : having a full rounded figure : pleasingly plump Examples: "… Marilyn is lucky that … the Hollywood powers at least had the smarts not to put her on a diet. She looked plenty good zaftig." — Bookwormroom.com, 31 May 2012 "But Oprah—now there's a woman who has run the dieting gauntlet over the years. In 1988, she pulled a wagon full of 67 pounds of quivering fat onto the stage to show what she had lost on a liquid diet. Then she ballooned up to 200 pounds after a thyroid malfunction, before running the Marine Corps Marathon at a healthy zaftig size." — Leah McLaren, The Globe and Mail (Canada), 23 Oct. 2015 Did you know? Over the centuries, some women have been approvingly described as full-figured, shapely, womanly, curvy, curvaceous, voluptuous, and statuesque. Such women are, in a word, zaftig. Zaftig has been juicing up our language since the 1930s (the same decade that gave us Yiddish-derived futz, hoo-ha, and schmaltz, not to mention lox). It comes from the Yiddish zaftik, which means "juicy" or "succulent" and which in turn derives from zaft, meaning "juice" or "sap." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.