And today's word is ...

asseverate

It's a word I never knew existed until I read it in a short story, Monday or Tuesday, by Virginia Woolf. I had to look it up. Dictionary.com tells me it means,

1. to declare earnestly or solemnly; affirm positively; aver.

from the Latin assevērātus spoken in earnest (past participle of assevērāre)

Who knew?

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, 1813

Mrs. Woolf, obviously. And Thomas Moore, who used it in Volume 6 of his six-volume Life of Lord Byron (1854). My guess is Lord Byron also probably knew what the word meant. I doubt that I shall ever use asseverate in any other context but, as ever, I am indebted to Virginia Woolf. 

I could be being a smarty pants here: Perhaps a year before this portrait was completed Lady Caroline Lamb asseverated that her lover, Lord Byron, was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." 

Allegedly.