Word of the day: mephitic

The word of the day is mephitic:

1. offensive to the smell.
2. noxious; pestilential; poisonous.

1620s, from L.L. mephiticus, from L. mephitis "noxious vapor" (also personified as a goddess believed to have the power to avert it).

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mephitic)

"Inuits from far and wide believed that this seething mephitic realm was the place where the souls of the recently deceased entered the underworld."

 - Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of the Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette