Word-Wednesday for November 5, 2025

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 5, 2025, the twenty-first Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of fall, the first Wednesday of November, and the three-hundred ninth day of the year, with fifty-six days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for November 5, 2025
Milkweed Gone to Seed
The pods of Asclepias species, aniniwish in Anishinaabe, have burst open. Milkweed produce their seeds in pods called follicles — just the beginning of interesting words associated with their reproduction. The seeds, which are arranged in overlapping rows, bear a cluster of white, silky, filament-like hairs known as the coma — often referred to by other names such as pappus, floss, plume, or silk. Wannaska aniniwish follicles have now ripened and split open, and the seeds, each carried by its own coma, sail through our newly November skies the brisk autumn wind.

November 5 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


November 5 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for November 5, 2025
Sunrise: 7:17am; Sunset: 4:57pm; 3 minutes, 6 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 4:35pm; Moonset: 7:39am, full moon, 99% illuminated.
Today’s Full Beaver Supermoon is the closest Supermoon of the year!


Temperature Almanac for November 5, 2025
                Average            Record              Today
High             38                     64                     41
Low              43                     -7                      25

Full Moon
By Alice Oswald

Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep.

It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole.
I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,
except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.

Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,
Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,
There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer
Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There's no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?

November 5 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Stress Awareness Day
• National Love Your Red Hair Day
• National Donut Day
• Guy Fawkes Night

November 5 Word Pun
Pre- means before, and post- means after.
Using both at the same time would be preposterous.


November 5 Word Riddle
What’s Irish and stays out all night?*

a Chairman Joe 2023 original

November 5 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
DEBT, n., An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.

    As, pent in an aquarium, the troutlet
    Swims round and round his tank to find an outlet,
    Pressing his nose against the glass that holds him,
    Nor ever sees the prison that enfolds him;
    So the poor debtor, seeing naught around him,
    Yet feels the narrow limits that impound him,
    Grieves at his debt and studies to evade it,
    And finds at last he might as well have paid it.
                    —Barlow S. Vode


November 5 Etymology Word of the Week
obsess
/əb-SES/ v., preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent, from circa 1500, "to besiege" (a sense now obsolete), from Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere "watch closely; besiege, occupy; stay, remain, abide" literally "sit opposite to," from ob "against" (see ob-) + sedere "to sit" (from Proto-Indo-European root sed- "to sit"). In reference to evil spirits, "to haunt," from 1530s. The psychological sense of "to haunt as a fixed idea" developed gradually from 1880s and emerged 20th century. The 1895 Century Dictionary has only the two senses "besiege" (marked obsolete) and "to attack, vex, or plague from without."


November 5 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1499 The Catholicon, written in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc in Tréguier, is published; this is the first Breton dictionary as well as the first French dictionary.
• 1771 Carlo Goldoni's prose comedy Le Bourru Bienfaisant premieres.
• 1783 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 36 premieres.
• 1872 In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.
• 1876 Johannes Brahms' First Symphony in C premieres.
• 1886 Edward MacDowell's orchestra suite Ophelia premieres.
• 1890 Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor debuts.
• 1930 American novelist Sinclair Lewis became the first U.S. writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for his satirical examination of American culture and institutions.
• 1931 Jean Genet's play Judith premieres.
• 1948 American-born British poet T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for literature.

November 5 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1575 Guido Reni, Italian Baroque painter.
• 1590 Gerard van Honthorst, Dutch painter.
• 1640 Carlo Mannelli, Italian composer.
• 1656 Leonard Sailer, German composer.
• 1674 Anton Englert, German composer.
• 1740 Augustus Montague Toplady, English hymn writer.
• 1797 Aleksander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Russian author.
• 1800 Eduard Brendler, Swedish composer.
• 1812 Aleardo [Gaetano] Aleardi, Italian poet.
• 1846 Gaston Serpette, French composer.
• 1859 Stanisław Niewiadomski, Polish composer.
• 1862 Eden Phillpotts, English novelist, poet and playwright.
• 1863 William Faulkes, British organist, transcriber and composer.
• 1876 James Earle Fraser, American sculptor.
• 1879 Will Rogers, American humorist.
• 1881 Gena Branscombe, Canadian pianist and composer.
• 1884 Harry Ferguson, Irish inventor and writer.
• 1887 Knut Algot Håkanson, Swedish composer.
• 1889 Alton Adams, American composer.
• 1890 Klabund [Alfred Henschke], German writer.
• 1890 Jan Zrzavý, Czech artist.
• 1891 Miroslav Krejčí, Czech composer.
• 1897 Oscar Lorenzo Fernández, Brazilian conductor and compose.
• 1900 Luigi Lucioni, Italian-American landscape painter.
• 1903 Ion Vasilescu, Romanian composer.
• 1904 Walter Bauer, German Canadian writer.
• 1905 Martin Raschke, German author.
• 1906 Arnold Cooke, British composer.
• 1906 Siegfried Borris, German composer.
• 1911 Osamu Shimizu, Japanese composer.
• 1912 Vadim Salmanov, Russian composer.
• 1922 Poul Rovsing Olsen, Danish composer.
• 1925 Kjerstin Dellert, Swedish opera singer.
• 1927 Vittorio Fellegara, Italian composer.
• 1928 Hannah Weiner, American experimental poet.
• 1929 Shakuntala Devi, Indian writer.
• 1934 Judith Herzberg, Dutch poet and author.
• 1935 Elgar Howarth, English conductor and composer.
• 1944 Toni Stern, American poet.
• 1946 Robert Mapplethorpe, American photographer.
• 1950 Charles Frazier, American novelist.
• 1958 Lorraine Francis, Irish children's author.
• 1960 Marc Awodey, American artist and writer.
• 1961 Daron Hagen, American composer.
• 1963 Wang Shu, Chinese architect.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge 
Write a story or pram from the following words:

• appetency: /AP-ih-ten-see/ n., a longing desire or hunger; a natural tendency or affinity.
• cinquefoil: /SANGK-foil/ n., an ornamental design of five lobes arranged in a circle, e.g. in architectural tracery or heraldry; a widely distributed herbaceous plant of the rose family, with compound leaves of five leaflets and five-petaled yellow flowers.
• dovecoat: /DəV-kōt/ n., a shelter with nest holes for domesticated pigeons.
• fumfer: /FUM-fuhr/ v., to mumble, to speak inarticulately or indistinctly; to falter in one's speech.
• nosism: /NOH-siz-uhm/ n., with reference to a group of people: a self-centered attitude, corresponding to egotism in an individual.
• spriggan: /SPRIG-uhn/ n., a supernatural being, typically characterized as small, ugly, and malicious, and frequently considered to be associated with ancient earthworks and remote places; a malevolent fairy or sprite.
• stollen: /SHTÔ-lən/ n., a rich German fruit and nut loaf.
• toile: /twäl/ n., an early version of a finished garment made up in cheap material so that the design can be tested and perfected; a translucent linen or cotton fabric, used for making clothes.
• woodeny: /WUUD-uhn-ee/ adj., resembling or characteristic of wood; having a wooden quality; stiff, lifeless.
• zwijgen: /zv-EYE-ghen/ v., DUTCH, to be quiet; to be silent; to shut up.

November 5 2025 Word-Wednesday Feature
November
/nō-VEM-bər/ n., the eleventh month of the year, in the northern hemisphere usually considered the last month of autumn, from circa 1200, from Old French novembre and directly from Latin November (also Novembris (mensis)), from novem "nine". The ninth month of the Roman calendar, which began in March. In Old English, it was Blotmonað "month of sacrifice," literally "blood-month," the time when the early Saxons prepared for winter by sacrificing animals, which they then butchered and stored for food.

November seems to carry a difficult place in the psyche's of many authors. Here are a few of their largely unfavorable words about this penultimate month, voiced entirely by women:

Why has no one written a November rhapsody with plenty of lilt and swing? The poets who are moved at all by this month seem only stirred to lamentation, giving us year end and 'melancholy days' remarks, thereby showing that theory is stronger than observation among the rhyming brotherhood, or else that they have chronic indigestion and no gardens to stimulate them.

Mabel Osgood Wright, from The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife

November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year.

Louisa May Alcott, from Little Women

Here’s November,
The year’s sad daughter.

Eleanor Farjeon

Long cold nights mark November’s return, grey rains fall, wind walks in the bronze oak leaves.

Gladys Taber, from Still Cove Journal 

In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.

Martha Gellhorn

November’s night is dark and drear,
The dullest month of all the year.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

It was one of those wet, miserable evenings, gratis copies distributed by November through the year.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, from Romance and Reality

Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast.

Sara Coleridge, from Pretty Lessons from Verse for Good Children

November at its best—with a sort of delightful menace in the air.

Anne Bosworth Greene, from The Lone Winter

November is chill, frosted mornings with a silver sun rising behind the trees, red cardinals at the feeders, and squirrels running scallops along the tops of the gray stone walls.

Jean Hersey

November has a way of her own. Crisp air, swaying Spanish needles, echo of honking geese held in memory from the night, motors passing on the radio.

Blanche H. Dow

Some of the days in November carry the whole memory of summer as a fire opal carries the color of moonrise.

Gladys Taber, from Stillmeadow Daybook 

From A Year with Rilke, November 5 Entry
God is Ripening, from The Book of Hours I, 16

When gold is in the mountain
and we've ravaged the depths
till we've given up digging,

it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.

Even when we don't desire it,
God is ripening.

Meadow in the Mountains
by Vincent van Gogh

Be better than yesterday, 
learn a new word today, 
try to stay out of trouble — at least until tomorrow, 
and write when you have the time.






*Patty O’Furniture.