Word of the Day for Monday, May 1, 2006 luminary \LOO-muh-nair-ee\, noun: 1. Any body that gives light, especially one of the heavenly bodies. 2. A person of eminence or brilliant achievement. Those who came to the Pyrenees sought the sublime in the mountains and the exotic in the population, drawn by the descriptions of ethnographers and literary luminaries like Vigny, Sand, Baudelaire and Flaubert.-- Ruth Harris, Lourdes . . .such jazz luminaries as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Armstrong, and Earl Hines.-- Daniel Mark Epstein, Nat King Cole There's something comforting in those occasional lapses when a luminary lurches and trips over the humble stone his powerful torch somehow failed to reveal.-- Brad Leithauser, "You Haven't Heard the Last of This", New York Times, August 30, 1998 Luminary derives from Latin luminare, "a window," from lumin-, lumen, "light." Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for luminary