The Word of the Day for March 17 is:

Example sentence:
"I like Aunt Delores, but she still calls me 'Little Tommy,' and I don't think she's ever cottoned on to the fact that I'm a doctor," complained Tom.

Did you know?
The noun "cotton" first appeared in English 700 years ago. It comes, via Middle French, from the Arabic word for cotton, "qutun." Then, in the 15th century, "cotton" donned a new hat, becoming a verb. Though the first verb sense, "to form a nap on (cloth)" is obsolete, our modern-day use might have spun from it. Cloth with a nap was preferred by milliners, who sometimes used the phrase "cotton well" when all the hat materials came together nicely and resulted in a good hat. This might be the source of the 17th-century expression "to cotton well," meaning "to get along together, to agree," from which evolved our sense of "take to." The "understand" sense is much newer, first appearing in the early 20th century.