What the calendars are
Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day (calendar, free email, and podcast) and its page-a-day cousins deliver one current, usable word daily: definition, pronunciation, example sentence. The words are chosen to be deployable; learn Tuesday's and you can use it Wednesday. As vocabulary-building machinery it's cheap, proven, and even free if you take the email. No honest comparison beats it on utility per dollar.
The fair characterization: calendars are disposable by design (yesterday tears off and hits the bin), the words are workaday by mission, and January's vocabulary is long gone by June. It's a treadmill, in the good and bad senses.
What ours is
365 Days of Forgotten Words plays a different game: a daily dictionary of English's lost beauties, apricity (the warmth of winter sun) to zemblanity (the opposite of serendipity), each with its story: where the word lived, why it died, what it deserves. You will rarely deploy these in a meeting, and that's not the point; the point is the particular pleasure of a language's attic. It's our best-rated title: ★4.8 across 35 Amazon ratings, August 2026.
The actual differences
Utility versus delight. The calendar upgrades your working vocabulary; ours upgrades your affection for the language. Both are word-a-day habits; they exercise different muscles.
Disposable versus keepable. A calendar ends in the recycling every December; the book stays shelved, gets reopened, gets handed to the next word lover in the family. For a gift, that difference does most of the work.
Free versus $20 once. Merriam-Webster's email costs nothing, and honesty says start there if utility is the goal. Ours costs a paperback and is the only place this particular collection lives.
How to pick
Building vocabulary for work, tests, or writing: Merriam-Webster, and take the free email first. Buying for the person who reads dictionaries for fun, plays the long crossword, or says “there should be a word for that”: ours, and see our free tour of forgotten English and the untranslatables guide for a taste of the register. Plenty of word people run both: the calendar for the toolbox, the book for the treasure chest.
Common questions
Is the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day free?
Yes: the daily email and podcast cost nothing, and the physical page-a-day calendar is a modest annual purchase. For pure vocabulary building it's the best value in the category, and we say that while selling the competition.
What counts as a forgotten word?
A word English actually had (attested in dictionaries and print) that fell out of use: apricity, vellichor, absquatulate. 365 Days of Forgotten Words documents each with its meaning, history, and the reason it deserves daylight, rather than inventing plausible-sounding words.
Are word-a-day calendars good gifts?
Good and safely generic. A book of forgotten words is the same daily ritual with a longer shelf life: it doesn't expire in December and reads as a more personal choice for the word lover. Our book-gift guide covers the wider decision.
Will forgotten words improve my vocabulary?
Your usable vocabulary, only at the margins; your feel for the language, considerably. The book is closer to a nature reserve than a gym: the pleasure is the point, and the etymology habit it builds quietly improves how you see every other word.