Neologism

The word of the day is 'nurdle.' You won't find it in the dictionary yet, but look for it to appear soon, as nurdles are a major presence in the world. By way of offering a definition and to see the word used in context, I give you the following, which is lifted from a New York Times review of Alan Wiesman's bestselling new book, The World Without Us:

A million years from now, a collection of mysterious artifacts would remain to puzzle whatever alien beings might stumble upon them: the flooded tunnel under the English Channel; bank vaults full of mildewed money; obelisks warning of buried atomic waste (as current law requires) in seven long-obsolete human languages, with pictures. The faces on Mount Rushmore might provoke Ozymandian wonder for about 7.2 million more years. (Lincoln would probably fare better on the pre-1982 penny, cast in durable bronze.) But it’s hard to imagine an alien archaeologist finding poetry in the remote Pacific atolls awash in virtually unbiodegradable plastic bottles, bags and Q-tip shafts, or in the quadrillions of nurdles, microscopic plastic bits in the oceans — they currently outweigh all the plankton by a factor of six — that would continue to cycle uncorrupted through the guts of sea creatures until an enterprising microbe evolved to break them down.

Nurdles. N-U-R-D-L-E-S. Nurdles.