• hangover • Pronunciation: hæng-o-vêr • Hear it! Part of
Speech: Noun Meaning: 1. Something or someone left over from a
prior time period; a vestige, a holdover, a leftover, a remnant.
2. The unpleasant effects of overdrinking the night before or a
short period before, a katzenjammer. Notes: Today's word is an
interesting bit of evidence of the importance of word order in
language: an overhang is quite a different thing from a
hangover. The only derivation ever tried for this word is
hangoverish reported in 1939. The word currently appears only
5,350 times on the Web, mostly in dictionaries. In Play: First
things first: "This dorm must be a hangover from an old insane
asylum!" The second meaning was derived from the first by means
of narrowing to a strictly pejorative sense: "I had such a
hangover from the party last night that I think I might have
flunked the chemistry exam." Word History: Today's Good Word is
obviously a compound comprising hang + over. Hang, the verb, is
related to Hittite gang- "to hang"