Word of the Day for Saturday, November 20, 2010

weal \WEEL\, noun :

1. Well-being, prosperity, or happiness.
2. A raised mark on the surface of the body produced by a blow.
3. (Obsolete:) the state or body politic.

Our difference of opinion amounts to this, that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain age of achievement.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The Prime Minister’s recent call on physicians to be more mindful about the health needs of the poor may have come from a genuine concern for the weal of the large swathes of people who fall under that head.
– Nerun Yakub, “Calling on physicians to perform better,” Financial Express, October, 2010

Weal shares the Old English root wela with welfare and a host of other English words. The ultimate source in Proto-Indo-European is wel- , which is also the ancestor of words related to will .
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