Word of the Day:

“Otters do not like to share food.... There is a flickering movement of jaws before they swallow and dive again. For a moment I think they have left, then they surface once more and I make out two long shapes, one just ahead of the other. They wend their way further down the waterway before insinuating themselves back into the dark.” — Miriam Darlington, Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter, 2024

More example sentences

“Out through the fields and woods / And over the walls I have wended …” So wrote poet Robert Frost in “Reluctance,” using the word’s familiar sense of “to direct one’s course.” By the time of the poem’s publication in 1913, many other senses of wend had wended their way into and out of popular English usage including “to change direction,” “to change someone’s mind,” “to transform into something else,” and “to turn (a ship’s head) in tacking.” All of that turning is linked to the word’s Old English ancestor, wendan, which shares roots with the Old English verb, windan, meaning “to twist” (windan is also the ancestor of the English verb wind as in “the river winds through the valley”). Wend is also to thank for lending the English verb go its past tense form went (as a past tense form of wend, went has long since been superseded by wended).