COOKIE

Ok, I don't even need to write a definition in here. 'Duh, COOKIE?', you're saying...

Well the real reason I put this in here is:
A. I really like cookies.
2. Because I didn't know that COOKEY and COOKY are good words. Just looks like bad spelling to me.

FEUAR

n. pl. -S one granted land under Scottish feudal law

I knew FEU was a word, but I guess I never looked at the extensions of it. Also good are FEUED and FEUING.

Speaking of granted land, I'm trying to nail down a family vacation in VA. And let me say that dealing with landlords, deposits, and contracts via email is not fun.

NIGELLA

n. pl. -S an annual herb

I found this one on the NSA word of the day page, where today's word was GALLEIN.
NIGELLA is an anagram, and also happens to be a British chef (ironically) who has a couple of cookbooks lining our kitchen shelf. My wife also just let me know that she already knew it was an herb. Guess I'm not as sharp as I thought.

CODON

n. pl. -S a triplet of nucleotides (basic components of DNA)

found: on the cover of Nature magazine or something I was delivering today..

I feel like I should know this word, but it's been a long time since high school biology. This is also the first time I've seen the Scrabble dictionary actually explain a word in the definition- maybe because you can't look up 'nucleotides' elsewhere in it?

EUTAXY

n. pl. -IES good order

I ought to memorize more words that start with EU. There are some really good ones. EUGENIA, EULOGIA, EUPNOEA and EUCAINE come to mind, because I've memorized most of the 7 letter vowel dumps, but I don't know many shorter ones.

PHILTRUM

n. pl. -TRA the indentation between the upper lip and the mouth

OK, a bit of a story behind this one.. Whenever my son Zeke gets a runny nose, the area below his nose gets all red and chapped and requires nightly applications of Vaseline (or 'gasoline, as he calls it). So this morning when I noticed the redness was gone, I said 'Zeke, your lip isn't red anymore', he said 'Dad, that's not my lip'. I acknowledged that he was right, and we decided to use the power of the almighty internet to look it up. Voile. PHILTRUM.

And no, this isn't a picture of my son.

Another word of interest that I have read in passing in the scrabble dictionary is PHILTER, (alt. spelling PHILTRE), which means 'to put under the spell of a love potion.