Word of the Day for Saturday, November 20, 2010weal \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 KareninaThe 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, 2010Weal 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 .Dictionary.com <[email protected]>