Word of the Day: witenagemot

witenagemot (n) [wit-n-uh-guh-moht]

The assembly of the witan; the national council attended by the king, aldermen, bishops, and nobles.

"What did the new mayor discuss with his predecessor? 'The Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, a session of the counselors (the witan) of a king in Anglo-Saxon England. Such a body existed in each of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,' quipped Johnson, a reference to the tribal assembly of wise men who kept the king in check before the Norman conquest.
Weak rulers were dependent on the Witenagemot. Boris, it appeared, was happy to pick up tips from Ken on how to shake off the shackles of the London assembly."
--Patrick Barkham, "So, Ken, how does one run this Saxon Witenagemot?" The Guardian, Saturday 10 May 2008

I'm part Anglo-Saxon (English), part Celtic (Welsh), part a few other things. Ancestry doesn't mean much to me, but I love the English language and have devoted myself to it, for better or worse. For better AND worse.

(Witenagemot, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary. The last one, alphabetically.)